Your Kid's Passion is a Gift, not a Curse
Kids are wild. They run, they scream, they explore. My daughter sprints everywhere she goes. If she needs water, she runs to the refrigerator as fast as she can. Shoes? She flys up the stairs. Time to go? She darts past her brother to get to the door. She's excited. She's passionate, and I aim to remember that her passion is a blessing.
It's temtpting, as a parent, to try and tame my children. I'm not talking about discipline. Of course, we discipline. I'm talking about stifling their passion, excitement, and joy, just because they're passionate about little things, excited in a loud way, and joyful when I'm trying to get them to go to sleep.
Children spend their childhood being told to sit down, slow down, and quiet down. Then, when they're grown, we complain that they don't take take a stand, take initiative, or speak up. We ask, "where's the motivation? Where's the passion? Where's the drive?" The answer is, of course, we told them to supress years ago.
New Testament missionaries were driven by a passion for God's glory among the nations and filled with a boldness to live the mission. Passages like Acts 28:31 and Ephesians 6:19 remind us that there is a need for Gospel boldness. Oh that we would see the passion of our children and, instead of pushing it back, we would cultivate it, encourage it, and lead our children to become passionate and bold for the things of Christ!
I pray that our children would become burdened for the things of the Lord. That a Gospel need in our broken world would capture their heart and move their feet to respond. That we would not wonder what hapened to their drive years from now, for we will, even now, give them room to run, room to love boldly, room to sprint to the hurting, room to fly to the nations, room to dart to the least of these for the glory of Christ. That we would see the passion of the next generation and view it as a needed gift, for which, we are desperate.
Jonathan Williams is the founder of Gospel Family Ministries and the Senior Pastor of Wilcrest Baptist Church, a multi-ethnic church of 44 nations located in Houston, TX.
