Some lessons our parents never taught us. Consider not getting those lessons a parental oversight, or consider those missing lessons as lessons our parents never learned in the first place. Surprisingly, parents really never knew everything as we young children believed.
As a child growing up in Missouri, I guarantee you that no “School for Parenting” existed in the 1950s. Our parents’ parents handed down lessons, or our parents flew by the seat of their pants. Nonetheless, parents sallied forth on their own without much if any training. Perhaps not attending such a school that taught parents how to parent resulted in our becoming such the wonderful and perfect people we believe ourselves to be, because we needed to teach ourselves how to grow up on our own, always treating ourselves with greater kindnesses than some parent-disciplinarians. On the other hand, maybe we live less perfectly, because our lives lacked certain important lessons that even today we never learned. You decide. Suffice it to say that parenting can be a very bewildering time and not all the bases get covered before children leave home.
One important lesson my parents never taught me concerned nose care. Yes, that’s right. Nose care. Sounds funny, but all my life I suffered from “Hay Fever.” As I grew up, the medical community changed my diagnosis, calling my symptoms “Allergies”; and, every fall when I returned to school, I carried an enormous, white handkerchief with me to school. I always felt embarrassed. All day long I sneezed, dripped, and grew increasingly shy because of my “Allergies.” It made reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic-ing challenging; and, every time I bent down my head to read or write or figure math, my nose went wild. And by the time I made it home at the end of each school day, my soppy handkerchief required immediate laundering.
Then one day, after living with my “Allergies” for decades, I discovered a marvelous lesson: I discovered that if I trimmed my nose hairs along with taking antihistamines and vasoconstrictors, I found myself cured of “Allergies”. Not only that, I snored less – a blessing for my entire family. Still today I ask myself, “Why didn’t my parents ever teach me these lessons?” Then it dawned on me that they rarely sneezed, although they always snored; yet, they snored only at night as they slept, and they never knew they snored. They never knew just how awful I slept because of their snoring. I must say that they kept we wide awake during much of my childhood, and I never made mention of their snoring, because I thought all parents snored, which I found out later in life as an untruth. Now that I learned lessons my parents never taught me, I can rove around town without any handkerchief and sleep better at night. Occasionally I sneeze, but I recover almost immediately.
What’s my point?
As good a parent as God wishes to be, not every life lesson gets covered. While biblical narratives teach hundreds of lessons about how to be a good person (whether we suffer from “Allergies” or not), not every lesson about life gets addressed.
For example, Jesus taught from Deuteronomy 6 to love God with all your mind, soul, heart, and strength and from Leviticus 19:18 to love your neighbor as yourself.
While those two commandments from Christ cover a lot of bases, they cannot cover every situation we find ourselves involved in. While the first Fruit of the Spirit is love, there are more: peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23, New International Bible) And so, if we love and sometimes exhaust all the remaining Fruit of the Spirit, losing our ability to be gentle or kind for example, what additional lessons can our parent, God, teach us?
I believe the answer might be something like God saying, “I gave you a brain. I gave you a heart. I gave you a soul and an ability to love in great measure. Start using your brain, your heart, your soul, and your ability to love to teach yourself love lessons. Be creative. I Am.”
All of us reach the end of our rope sometimes when no biblical narrative fits the bill for an endless, wearying or troublesome situation. We might scour the Bible for the answer not to be found there. At times like these, continue to pray, continue Bible study, and, also, be creative, using the brain, heart, soul, and ability to love that God gave you. No book no matter how long, no matter how great, and no matter how brilliant can ever cover all the bases as we live.
Take initiative. Explore your heart and mind. Learn something new every day. Keep your eyes and ears open. Be persistent as well as prepared to make a new discovery. In this way we can learn lessons our parents, including our divine Parent, could never teach us.
Tom Towns is pastor of First United Methodist Church in Cortez.