Walking Through the Hard

I am not a 13 year old boy.

I have never been a 13 year old boy.

I have exactly 0 experience with the psyche of 13 year old boys.

This makes me feel incredibly under-qualified to be responsible for the eternal soul of a 13 year old boy.

But, when God was assembling the cast of characters in our family he included a funny, goofy, smart, kind, sensitive, compassionate boy.

Lately, our family has faced some significant challenges and those challenges have deeply impacted my sweet, funny, intelligent and slightly aggravating 13 year old boy. I have to be honest and admit that I don't know how to process many of the things that have happened, and therefore I feel utterly worthless at helping him process these things.

I don't remember ever walking through the hard when I was a child. Not to say I grew up in a fairy tale, but I had a wonderful, safe, stable childhood and my parents kept me carefully shielded from anything that was beyond what they felt like I was old enough to handle.

Maybe that is my mistake-being too open about this hard time we are walking through.But I also feel a need to model transparency to my children so that they are able to model it in adulthood.

So I am walking this hard road with my son. We fight, we make up. We yell, we say things we don't mean, we apologize, we forgive.

I can't give him the world, and I don't think it would be good if I could-he needs to understand that this world is of no eternal value to him. So what I am trying to teach him, while learning at the same time, is that the hard is temporary. It is the blink of an eye in the eternity of our future with God.

Being 13 is hard.

Being 37 is hard.

So we are learning to survive the hard together.

Blessings,
Meri