The Children Are Dating

It's all I can do to remember that this once happened to me

It’s a wild world when your children start dating. Wild, I tell you. I did not see it coming, because who imagines their children in a romantic relationship? They are children. They are chubby-cheeked and facial hair-less. They are interested in sweaty sports and what’s for dinner. And even though the Christian books tell you to pray for your child’s spouse from infancy, you are not actually thinking about the possibility of that spouse at all, outside of jokes. All jokes.

You do not see it coming.

Well, it came. And here I am with children who are dating, and thinking rather deeply and seriously about it. There is no telling what will happen or where these relationships will end up, but it is happening and it is wild.

Of course, I am somewhat kidding because I am neither blind nor opposed to children growing up and becoming adults and the natural course of possible future mates coming into their lives. But now that it is happening, it feels sudden and unruly. I want to have my own ducks in a row, at least as far as How To Parent These Children Who Are Dating—but the ducks are not in a row. They are waddling off in every direction, unsure about how to steer and guide these budding relationships, when to speak up and when to keep quiet, when to set boundaries and when to give freedom, when to critique or if to critique at all (never! says one duck, sometimes! says another).

My own dating experience was a similar leap into deep waters without much warning. I never had a boyfriend until late one summer evening after my sophomore year of college, walking down a dark, tree-lined street, when Josh told me that he liked me and wondered if I felt the same. I had read every Elisabeth Elliot book in print at that point, as well as Jim Elliot’s journals, and my expectations were sky-high as far as how this love story might go, and the kind of people we were going to be as we wrote it. I had a lot to learn.

In many ways, I am thankful for the ways that EE’s story shaped me. I am not one of those who decries her writing or her views as harmful. I didn’t take away from her what some from my generation did. What I learned from Elisabeth and Jim was a desire to obey the Lord over and above anything else. They loved God, and they trusted Him. Those are hooks I will still hang my life on. They were extremely intelligent, unusually disciplined, and exceptionally passionate people. It’s no wonder they took some things to extremes. I’m not sure many could have withstood the rigor they put themselves through. But their aim was a worthy one.

So I never took away some kind of message that if you kept yourself pure or did all the right things, you would be given a strong and healthy marriage. In fact, if anything I expected suffering and difficulty as the result of obedience. So much so that Josh started to question what seemed an almost unhealthy premonition I had that marriage would be hard. It could also be good, I remember him saying. We should expect that it will be good. Otherwise, what are we doing?

It’s funny to me now, those discussions we used to have, and also not funny. Marriage is hard because life is hard, and yet it is those hard things that also make marriage good. What did I know all those years ago of the man who held my hand on that dark, humid night under the streetlights? You glimpse at a person’s character, but you don’t know how the future difficulties will shape it. You don’t know how they will grow in integrity as they do hard things that no one sees, how their humility will be deepened as they endure blame or accept an unwanted task, how you will learn to lean into one another time and again because that is what the Lord Jesus calls you to do even when you feel hurt or offended or ignored or unloved. You don’t know how you will have to forgive and ask to be forgiven. You don’t know that your sadness will be absorbed by them that their sadness will deeply affect you, and that you will have to learn to bear one another’s burdens.

You don’t know that as you make the choice over and over again to never, ever walk away, choosing one another again and again for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, you will turn around one day and discover that you have a marriage you did not plan or make on your own terms. You have a good marriage. And it did not come about because things were easy. Or because you chose so well, or read the right books.

This is where the unruly-parenting-ducks I am trying to pull together are leading me. I want to point my dating children to the right things, the best choices, the wisest ways as they go about their relationships, and yet it also feels wildly out of my hands. I pray for them like their whole lives depend on my prayers, and I fret about giving them the right words at the right time. But I can rest in the fact that their heavenly Father knows how to work with them in ways that are far better than I can ask or imagine. He certainly has done so with me.