By Zhang Heng, China
My Viewpoints Were Wrong
God knew the fallacies within my viewpoints and the next day, when practicing spiritual devotion, I inadvertently saw a passage of God’s words, “Furthermore, many parents think that as long as it is for their children’s sake, whatever they do is right. They truly have such thoughts and points of view. How could you not make mistakes? You, too, are a corrupted human, so how can you determine that you are without error? As long as you admit that you do not possess the truth and that you are a corrupted human, then you have faults and can make mistakes. You are capable of making mistakes—yet how is it that at every turn, you try to take charge of your children and make them constantly obey you? Is this not an arrogant disposition? This is an arrogant disposition, and a ferocious one at that.”
After I finished reading this passage of God’s words, I couldn’t help but feel very ashamed. To think that I believed when we parents educated our children, our starting-points were for their good, so we were beyond criticism. But through God’s words, I came to understand: I’m also a corrupted human being; the way I educated my son wasn’t truth; I asked him to obey me absolutely, and even more, I took charge of him at every turn, which wasn’t in accordance with God’s intention. Though he is my son in the fleshly relationship, he has his own thoughts and opinions. So I have no reason to get him to listen to me at every point. I was always strict with him. Wasn’t it Satan’s arrogant disposition? Thinking of this, I no longer thought my behavior was all for his good. At that point, I was willing to let go of my pride and position as a father and open up to him. Then I prayed to God, asking Him to prepare a suitable chance for me.
One night, I saw my son had nothing to do and then I came to him and said calmly, “Son, let’s have a heart-to-heart talk.” He nodded in agreement. I asked him, “Before, when I lost my temper at you, what did you think?” He replied, “I just really wanted to tell you my inner thoughts. Actually, I had the plans in my mind and I knew I needed to arrange my time properly.” His words were beyond my expectation. Then I said, “In fact, I want you to have good study habits. When I saw you played games and didn’t do your homework, I got anxious inside. So I lost my temper at you. That was my fault. From now on, I’ll no longer do that, and if something happens, I’ll discuss and communicate with you….” That night we talked a lot as friends. Since he also read God’s words at usual times, finally, I said, “Let’s make an appointment: In the future, if I do something wrong, you can point it out to me. We help each other, pay attention to practicing God’s words and pursue being Christians God likes. OK?” He answered happily, “OK!”
I Realized My Son Had Grown up
That night, before I slept, I read another passage of God’s words, “The child has, in fact, long since grown up, he’s long since established his own way of thinking, state of mind, insight, and viewpoints—he’s long since had these things—yet the adults never realize this, they can never keep up, they always talk and interact with the child as if he’d just been born.”
I thought: That’s right. As my son grows older, he indeed gradually has his own thoughts and opinions. However, I always felt he was a little child, so I controlled him and forcefully indoctrinated him with the ideas which I thought were right. Besides, I didn’t get enough sense to have heart-to-heart talks or communicate with him in order to have an understanding of the inner world of him. But through having a chat with him openly just now, I gradually felt he was no longer the naive child in my heart. On the contrary, he has his own thoughts and views, and isn’t the one who has no opinions or plans as I imagined. Just because my ideas were constrained, I treated him as a child at a few years old all the time as if he knew nothing. Having experienced these matters, I realized my son had grown up and he was no longer the child I thought or the one who must be watched and forced to go ahead by me. Meanwhile, I shouldn’t control what he did any longer, but instead should know more about his inner world and allow him to show his innocent and lively side belonging to his age group. In dealing with his doing homework, I let go of my high-handed means and learned to allow nature to take its course. As for some new things he wanted to learn, I didn’t simply restrict him but led him to differentiate and let him know which were positive and which were negative.
When I did these things, I saw my son sometimes finished his homework in advance, and what’s more, he offered to ask whether we could have a gathering. Seeing this, I was so happy inside that I couldn’t help but offer God boundless praise and gratitude, because I knew it was all under the guidance of God. At the same time, I also saw that when I did things based on my corrupt satanic disposition, what it brought us was all pain, depression and indifference; instead, when I acted according to God’s requirements, there were unexpected results.
At another two-day weekend after school started, I asked my son, “When are you going to do your homework?” He said he had planned that how much homework he intended to do in the morning, how much he would do in the afternoon and what he would do the next day. Hearing that he had arranged his own time regularly, I said, “OK, now that you’ve arranged, just do as you planned.” When I saw he was growing up and maturing and that he had his own plans and directions to do things, I thought I indeed couldn’t see him with my old eyes any longer, nor could I employ corrupt disposition to deal with our relationship. Under the guidance of God’s love, we are both gradually growing up. All the glory be to God!
The End.
