My Parents Trained me in the Way I Should Go

Scripture says, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it." Many Christians erroneously believe this verse means "Do all the right things as a parent and when your kid grows up, he'll turn out right." What's a parent to do when a kid hits adolescence and his behavior and attitudes seem all wrong? Have Mom and Dad screwed up? Has God made a promise He hasn't kept? It doesn't compute.

But the phrase "the way he should go" means something different. It refers to a person's God-given bent, the way his Creator hard-wired him. It's a bent that shows up in the diaper stage and continues for life. For some the bent is toward analyzing data, experimenting with variables, and logging outcomes. That child is always asking, "What will happen if I do this?" (while jumping off Dad's dresser that he just scaled like Spider-Man). Mom is thinking, "This kid is nuts!" but the kid is trying to figure out how high, how fast, how many times, he can do this and what the outcomes could be. It's a thrill that surpasses the pain of punishment-- which he may or may not have been smart enough to predict. After several trips to the ER, the kid grows up to be an aerospace engineer.

God wired me to teach, and I credit my parents for recognizing, nurturing, and encouraging my bent. Most of the encouragement has come from their modeling. My mom has been a student for as long as I can remember, so books weren't just for us kids. While a pastor's wife, she earned double degrees, one in Political Science and the other in Religious Ed. (Sidebar: she missed her college graduation ceremony because she was recovering from a miscarriage/D&C that caused her to bleed to death on the operating table; she was miraculously revived.)

I grew up watching my mother teach. My earliest memories, of course, are so deep they aren't even observations. They just are. For instance, I didn't watch my mom teach my older sister to read. I don't remember that one day Rachel couldn't read, and the next day she could. I just know that reading was as natural as eating (though a rule in our house was "no books at the table" because it's rude unless you've planned to share it with the rest of the family). Somebody taught her, and that somebody was Mama. My mom taught all four of us girls to read. We had plenty of stories read to us by Daddy, too. (He has the best bedtime story voice; I tease him that I fell asleep during his sermons not because he was boring, but because his voice is so rich and smooth and peaceful.) I also watched my mom teach Backyard Bible Clubs to neighborhood children. Those flannelgraph boards with pictures of Jesus and His miracles made a lifelong impression on me. I grew up believing there's nothing Christ can't do, and subsequently, that I wanted to be a missionary and a teacher so I could manipulate flannelgraphs and flipcharts for a captive young audience.

Mama also taught Women's Aglow Bible studies, English to Chinese students, and taught an illiterate adult man to read so that he could read to his five-year-old daughter. I saw my mom at lecterns, around the kitchen table, and side-by-side students . I saw light in her eyes and heard a lilt in her voice when she taught, when students would have "aha!" moments or exclaim, "I can DO this!"

My dad loves theology, science, antique cars, and genealogy. Einstein is his favorite author. Does that tell you something? Daddy got his Mechanical Engineering degree at KU, met Mama, married her, and moved to Edgewood, MD, to work for the Dept of Defense. He later felt called to ministry, so he and Mama packed up their young family and moved to Missouri where Daddy got his MDiv (Masters of Divinity) at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Pastoring seemed every whit as woven into his DNA as engineering was.

But what I remember my dad mostly doing was helping me with algebra. I cried and pouted and stomped every single night about how stupid I was. "None of my daughters is stupid," he'd say (For the record, he had no sons.) "Let's work this out together. You'll get it." And painstaking after painstaking problem solving, I did. The man who had tutored the famous basketball player Wilt Chamberlain in college at KU was sitting beside a math idiot named Zoanna. And never once complained. Never once let out a sigh of impatience. My dad made me feel like there was nothing I couldn't accomplish if I broke it down into steps. Baptist yet Methodical, that's my dad.

Idyllic childhood I had, with great parents. Then came the teen years. Did my bent change? No. Did my behavior? Oh, yes. The Bible tells us not to dwell on the former things, the hidden things of darkness, so I won't. Suffice it to say that I went through a time of rejecting the Jesus I had once adored on a flannelgraph. I was double-minded and unstable in all my ways. (Good on the outside, rotten on the inside. Fooled lots of people.) But deep down I had an inescapable desire to help others learn things .

I was young. I am now old (er). So all that training up of me in the way I should go, has borne the lasting fruit of a love to teach. I am happiest when watching people of all ages soak up learning.
When they "get it," I have light in my eyes, I'm sure, because my soul is happy. I have not departed from my God-given bent. There's no possible way. I am just immeasurably thankful to God for my parents who didn't try to make an aerospace engineer out of me.