The Best in Your Kids: A Surprising Way to Bring it Out

So maybe knowing the off-roading ways of my mind, you won’t be surprised: My lunch recently inspired a way to draw out the best in my kids.

Lately I’ve been sawing into the Roma tomatoes glowing red from the wooden bowl on my counter. I lay slices of fresh mozzarella on top (because why not?), and then some ribbons of the basil forming its little green-leafed umbrellas on my front porch. It’s even better when I reach into the clay salt cellar on my stove and sprinkle sea salt on top.

This was inspired a bit by an article I read recently about salting, actually. Real Simple wrote,

In most dishes, the point of salt isn’t to make food salty but to make it more like its best self. “Salt brings out flavor. Chicken tastes more delicious and tomatoes taste more like summer tomatoes. Salt also enhances sweetness and reduces bitterness,” says Jill Santopietro, a cooking instructor in New York City. (emphasis added)

The True Africa

My brain’s off-roading continues: This article actually made me think of our five-plus years working in Uganda. It was a little intimidating to me to be a white missionary/non-profit-worker in Africa.

I listened to a thought-altering podcast by Tim Keller. He mentions a book, Whose Religion Is Christianity? which confronts the opinion that those who bring Christianity to Africa are destroying African culture.

The author, Lamin Sanneh, counters that this argument is really saying Christianity is for some cultures, but not for all. (I ask you: Doesn’t this feel more culturally grabby?) It’s the argument Christianity is a Western religion, despite the fact that according to Acts 8, neglects the fact that Africans likely had Christianity first.

So a Western businessman who says the spiritual forces Africans believe in are total bunk? That could be cultural totalitarianism.

But Christianity didn’t just acknowledge those forces. It gives Africans true, real hope and power for those spiritual forces. 

As Sanneh challenged, Christianity revives cultures to be their fullest form of themselves–as it did for my own ancestors, and as it does for me. Christianity makes Africa truly African.

And that’s how I would feel when I would stand–never sit! It was impossible–in the middle of African worship. My friends were vibrant and freed and following Jesus not in the image of the West, but through God’s image in them.

https://youtu.be/hDCKhJFGYas

Salt of the Earth. And parenting

Now, glancing at my salt cellar on the counter, I think in new ways about how Jesus has called us to be the salt of the earth (Matthew 5:13)–not just in preservation, but by calling forth God’s image in people, their truest selves.

And this is revealing to me a new way I can bring out the best in my kids.

You already know I’ve been thinking about our false selves lately: the sides of us we tend to lean on when we’re not deeply hooked up to God’s love.

We lean on our unique gifting, for example, to make us okay. I’ve seen my kids do this. (I see myself do this!)

We become more charming or achieving or helpful or alone in our thoughts. We’re more entertaining or demanding or controlling.

Rather than our true selves being fueled by love, we’re fueled by lies that we are what we do, or what others think, or what we have.

Finding Your Kids’ “Real You”

In a long, luxurious conversation the other night, my teenaged daughter and I talked about her temptation to find her false self in being unique. She sometimes separates herself from others out of fear of rejection. Instead, she seeks identities to prove she’s special.

(P.S. This is one of the things I love about having teenagers: Real conversation.)

So this is where, as a parent, I can sprinkle a little salt, so to speak. I can help call out her true flavors, the real image of God in her, unzipping that outer cover of her false self to reveal the beautiful girl I know and love beneath.

(Narnia fans, think of Eustace Scrubb shedding his dragon-y exterior in The Dawn Treader.) We help our kids discard their fear or self-focus or yearning to please or control.

Bring Out the Best in Your Kids

So practically speaking: We bring out the best in our kids–the truest version–as we help them

• reject sin and insufficient saviors, insufficient identities.
• discover their unique “false selves”–their default modes (often seen in stress) they seek for safety and worthiness.
• seek the unique image of God in them rather than raising our kids in our image. (See this post on my own struggle to raise a kid who, at his core, is very different than I am.)
• identify the lie-saturated “tapes” that play over and over in their heads. Usually they’re proclaiming some version of You are what others think of you. You are what you have. Or, You are what you do. Not, You are a deeply beloved child of God. (Shameless plug: The first chapter of my upcoming book is about practical ways to establish healthy identity in your kids…and it’s available free by subscribing over in the right sidebar of this website.)

Like Africans and Americans alike have discovered, we show our kids God is powerful over the forces dominating them since before they could remember.

The goal of my daughter shedding her useless “skin” isn’t so she’ll look more like me (any more than the purpose of making disciples in Africa would be to make them look more American). It’s to expose the image of God beneath.

I’d love your thoughts below on bringing out the best in our kids.

Tell us: How do you do it? What’s it look like practically?

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When Your Child is Different from What You Expected