Peter and I had dinner with friends the other night. Their
kids are in their twenties, and when we asked about them, they shook their
heads. It wasn’t just their own kids that had them worried. It was the whole
generation. They told stories of kids in rehab, kids failing out of college,
kids aimless and drifting and confused. And they wondered, “What could we be
doing differently as parents?”

We had a few suggestions. Although we don’t have teenage or
twenty-something kids ourselves, we have worked with teenagers for over a
decade now, and lived among thirty boys for six years. We suggested trying to
find mentors–adult friends, coaches, teachers, pastors. We suggested the value
of summer jobs and taking away the parental safety net at the appropriate time.
We suggested prayer.

But as we talked about it later, we realized that we might
have come off as saying that parenting is easy. That there’s a formula:
mentors+responsibility+spiritual leadership= good kids. The truth is, who knows
what parents need to do to help their kids grow up and thrive? Peter stands as
a classic example of a kid who should have failed–divorced parents with a
family history of alcoholism and depression. And yet after a few somewhat
rebellious years in high school he self-corrected (or something) and became a
Christian and ended up securing a good job and getting married young. Go
figure.

It’s easy to look at a family from the outside and judge. To
assume that the kids who stay close to home and work diligently and make it
through college in four years are the “good kids,” and the ones who wander off
and drink and do drugs and flunk out are the “bad” ones. Easier still to assume
that the parents are the cause of those behaviors. But Peter reminded me of the
story in Luke 15:11-32 of the father with two sons. The first son asks for his inheritance early and
spends it all in “wild” living. The second stays home and works diligently. Bad
son. Good son.

Three points stand out (among the myriad that could be made
about this passage). One, these two kids had the same father. It’s clear in the
parable that the father loves them equally. They just respond to his love in
different ways. Two, although the older son, the one who stays home, looks like
the “good” son, he’s a mess. He feels like a slave. He’s resentful of his dad
and his brother. He might have played by the rules, but he’s still miserable.
It’s the son who messed up who finally had a sense of his father’s love. And
three, for all the parents who are wondering what they did wrong because they
have a child who has rebelled, or a child who is quietly resentful–the parent
in this scenario is a stand in for God. If God’s kids turn out as rebels and
resenters, what do you expect for your own?

Now, I don’t think Luke 15 is meant to be a model for how to
parent. I think it’s meant to demonstrate God’s extravagant love for his
children and how hard it is for us to understand and receive that love. Still, for
parents who wonder what you could have done differently, remember that we often
need to run away before we can come home.