4 Ways to Know When God is Resetting Your Parental Narrative: A guest post by Tom Goodman

Pastor Tom Goodman encourages parents to find worth in God, not their children.

When your adult child breaks your heart, it exposes the glory story you’ve been living in. Thankfully, it can also be a time that God resets that story.

You live within a narrative that defines your worth in a certain way: I call that the “glory story.” For Christian parents, this includes seeing adult children living wise and godly lives. It’s what gives you hope as you look forward and a sense of worth as your look back.

But life doesn’t always cooperate within our desired narrative.

My youngest has been diagnosed with a thought disorder. Think A Beautiful Mind. Like diabetes, the disease can be managed by medication, lifestyle adjustments, and the guidance of knowledgeable people. Getting a young adult to accept this route to stability? Ah, now there’s the rub.

Typically symptoms begin right about when adulthood begins. That’s just about the time you expected your parental narrative to end with, “And because I’ve been such a good parent my children went off to live happily ever after.”

A Lesson from David

A narrative that doesn’t ground your worth in what you mean to God needs to be reset. We need to say with King David, “But you, O Lord are my glory, and the lifter of my head” (Psalm 3:3, ESV). David was saying, “God is the source of my worth, and God takes my chin in his hand and says, ‘Get your head up, David! We’re in this together!’”

David was fleeing an uprising in Jerusalem when he wrote that—an uprising instigated by his own son. At that point in his life, any glory he may have based in his piety, parenting, or power was gone. If his self-image had been based in his piety, well, that was over with the whole Bathsheba …