Let Go!

Dealing with adult children is really challenging.  It's a lot like teaching them to drive.  They get behind the wheel of your most expensive possession and they go flying down the road with no experience and sometimes no idea how to keep that car between the lines.  They don't recognize the signs and they aren't familiar with driving customs that keep experienced drivers within the law.  When they realize that they are in control they often ignore the pleas of their white knuckled parents demanding that they leave more than a few inches between their car and the next. Basically they are like unguided missiles looking for somewhere to impact.

Young adults are often like that.  Parents have spent eighteen years teaching their children about life and God and how to relate to both.  Then when they feel the power of their own legal rights and especially their own living environment, they throw off all their parents' carefully presented wisdom and theology.  They have to figure these things out for themselves.

In a real way, they are correct.  God has no Grandchildren.  We must all come to that crossroad where we decide for ourselves who is behind the wheel.  Are they going to apply their parents teaching or are they going to venture out and find their own beliefs.  It's their call now.

The last couple of years have been very difficult as a parent.  I've watched my adult children make choices that have broken my heart and made me ask myself where I went wrong.  I've spent untold hours before the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, in tears pleading for God's mercy and grace to be poured out on them as they go careening down life's highway.

Problem is, I've always been a control freak.  I've always wanted to supervise their every move.  I home schooled them so that the world didn't have a chance to rob them of their God-consciousness.  I made sure they knew their Bible verses.  I made sure they were at Church on Sunday.  When God called me to the Catholic Church, I was completely transparent with them about my journey (once I knew where that journey was headed).  I made sure to allow them the freedom to make their own choice concerning coming into the Church because they had been raised as Protestants and I knew that conversion to the Church was a difficult and personal decision.

But I have discovered that some of them came into the Church because the family was coming into the Church.  They were not so sure deep inside.  So when adulthood came along, they chose to follow their own conscience.  Unfortunately, that meant following their confusion right out of church of any kind.  For several weeks after learning that one of my daughters was agnostic, I sobbed into my pillow and into my Rosary.  How could this happen?  Why did they seem to sincere and now so sincerely disinterested?

At the same time that I was mourning the defection of my daughters, I attempted to give good sound advice to a couple of friends in their struggle to follow God.  That also turned into a disaster and I threw my hands up and asked God why every life I tried to touch and lead to Him was rejecting my good advice.

Eventually, when I stopped crying long enough to listen, these two words came through loud and clear.  "Let go."  It became painfully clear that God did not need my help and in fact found my help a hindrance at times.  Not that giving good advice or evangelizing our children isn't the right thing to do, but that trying to control our children and others is the wrong thing to do.  Having spoken the truth in love, my next assignment was to just "let go!"

After all, where was I when I was in my 20s?  Was I growing in grace?  Was I Catholic?  Was I busy searching out truth for myself?  Nope.  I was busy serving my own interests and light years away from where I am today.  So why do I expect my kids to be 55 year old when they are in their 20s?  Because I want guarantees that they will be in heaven and that they will realize all the wonderful things I have come to see.  All very good motives.  Perfect motives.  But I can't seem to stop trying to do God's work my way.  Frankly, I make a really bad Holy Spirit.  I just need to "let go."

Someone reminded me recently that as St. Ambrose advised St. Monica, I need to speak less to them about God, and more to God about them.  And because Jesus can't resist confidence in His grace, I need to trust Him with their eternal souls.  I need to trust His love for them to be as amazing as it has been for me.  I need to trust that they have caught more than I have been taught and know that the source of all life and all peace is found in Christ and His Church.

And since prayer is far more powerful than any influence on earth, I will pray.  I will offer every Mass I attend for  my precious children and Grandchildren.  I will accept the pain this life delivers and offer up every sacrifice that comes along for those precious souls.  I will love and encourage and hug till my dying day and then I will pray like I cannot pray now till Christ returns in glory for the souls of my descendants.   I will be confident in the grace of God and I will "let go."