MCC Podcasts
Love - Loving Our Kids
Well I'm super glad to be with you. My name is Ben Kearns. I'm one of the pastors on staff here, and we're going through our love series right now and we're talking about loving our kids. How great is that? There's kids. We love kids. We see pictures of kids. They're like kittens, but they're ours, you know, and we love them. And we're going to talk a little bit this morning about how in the world do we love them. Both are our own personal kids, our grandkids, but also as a church. How is the church? Are we going to embrace and care for kids? But before we talk about how we love kids, I think it's important to realize that even though it's in us to do it, even though we want to do it, there's this, our brokenness or whatever goes inside of us kind of prevents us from at least expressing that. And I think one of the things that prevents that is this kind of fear inside of us. And I just thought we're trying to do the little interaction thing. So if it doesn't work, you're going to make me feel like an idiot. So you got to help me out out of grace and towards me. But think about what are some of the things? What are the things that you're fearful about when you think of your kids and your grandkids and the kids in your life that you're nervous or that you care about? What are you fearful about? They'll become raiders fans. That's true. That's the worst that happens. That they'll die. Yeah, and health issues and just tragic issues. They'll get married. Yeah, or not soon enough or too soon. They won't know God. Yeah. What else? Drugs and alcohol. Yeah, failing, failing at life. All of our kids are getting their rejection letters right now or acceptance letters for college and all of that angst is bearing down. Well, I think it's interesting when you think about how do you love your kids and how do we love them? This underlying fear, and we said some nice tame ones, but a lot of us have these fears in our lives. And most of them are born out of our own failures, our own ways we've fallen short, our own death and destruction that was kind of part of our life before we got all cleaned up here at church this Sunday. And we take all that and then we dump it on our kids and we're like, oh man, our kids cannot do this. And our stance towards them is one of fear and one of anger when they don't live into that sometimes. But if we're going to really truly engage kids, if we're going to love kids, if we're going to make space for kids, and I think the simple solution, which makes sense in our heads, but to live out is really challenging, is that we move from a stance of fear and anger and shame towards one of love and grace, which on paper sounds great and it's super easy, but as we know is really challenging. We're going to look at one of my favorite passages of scripture and the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. And we love this story, right? We all can resonate. Oh, remember that time I gave God the finger and I took off. I did my thing. And then I came to my senses and was like, oh, okay God, I'm going to come back. And we read the story and there's different seasons in our life and we go, how cool is it that we have faith in a God who welcomes us, who cares for us, who invites us in, who doesn't hold all of our past wrongs against us, who doesn't throw down the gauntlet or shake his finger at us, or just unleash a pile of shame on us. But we have faith in a God who runs out to me, this who loves us and who cares for us. We love the story of the Prodigal Son. But this morning, as I read it again, in Luke chapter 15, I would encourage us as adults of this church, as the adult community of people who have kids of our own or if anything, we're at least part of a church that there's plenty of kids around, how are we to love them. And I would encourage us this morning to think of this story, not so much as taking on the mantle of the kid and soaking up God's grace, but really take on the mantle that we as adults are called to take on the mantle of the heavenly Father. The way in which we love our kids, care for our kids, make space for our kids, it is on us to put on the mantle of the Father of the Prodigal Son. So as we read it again this morning, just think of it through that lens. This is Luke chapter 15 starting in verse 11. Jesus continued, "There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of my estate,' and so he divided his property between them. Now not long after that, the younger son got together all that he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth and wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in the whole country and he began to be in need. And so he went and hired himself out to a citizen in that country and he spent and he sent him to go feed the pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. When he came to his senses he said, 'How many of my father's hired servants have food to spare and here I am starving to death.' I will sit out and go back to my father and say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against you and against heaven. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired hands and so he got up and he went to his father. But while he was still a long way off his father saw him and he was filled with compassion for him, he ran to his son, he threw his arms around him and he kissed him. The son said to his father, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you and I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' But his father said to his servants, 'Quick, bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet and bring the fatted calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate for the son of mine was dead and he is alive again. He was lost and is found and so they began to celebrate. This is the word of the Lord. I love this story and when I think about loving our kids I so desperately want to put on the mantle of the father in this story. He loves his kids. And what's so funny, the father represents God and God's very own kids didn't even do it right. So why are we putting this trip on ourself? God in this story is his kids and both of his kids totally missed the mark on this one. And God is the man so that we need to put on if we are going to love our kids correctly. Now there's three things I want to look at this morning and the first thing is if we're going to love our kids the way that God I think wants us to church to love our kids is one we have to love them by understanding them. We love our kids by getting them, by realizing who they are. Kids are not many versions of us, right? They're not like the many versions of us that we hope if they just play sports longer or get into the right school they'll be the better version of us. Kids are totally a unique being crafted by the very hands of God and God has a purpose and a plan for them that is so much bigger and better than being a little bit better version of you. And if we are going to love them we have to make space for them, we have to understand them. We have to see them. And what's so interesting in this story, the younger son says, "Father, give me what is mine. Basically drop dead. I want my inheritance now." And the father knows his son. He knows that his son needs to take off. He understands him. And as we as parents and as adults in this church we need to understand our kids. And what's hard is the primary task of kids is going from child to adult. That's what childhood is. That's what adolescence is. Going from being a kid, being identified with us to having their very own identity. And there's this psychologist named Carl Jung and he came up with this fancy term called individuation. And it's really simple. If you think about it, it's becoming an individual. It's separating from your family and realizing that you are your own person. And no youth pastors really read early 20th century psychologists. And so there was this academic chap Clark who worked down in Fuller and he made it understandable for us as youth workers and as for the church I think in general. And what he said is basically he took this big concept of individuation and said the bottom line is kids need to answer three basic questions for them to move from childhood to adulthood. And when they answer those three questions, they've arrived. The first question is who am I? Who am I? What kind of person am I going to be? What are my likes? What are my dislikes? What are my convictions? And what's so interesting is we try so hard to make our kids their identity to be what we want them to be. We want their convictions to be our convictions. We talk with our seniors all the time because we know that very soon our seniors are going to go off the college. They're going to be away from our control. They're going to be away from our site and truthfully they really are most of the time. And so what happens is we want them to know who are they? What are their convictions? What are their things? Not mine, not yours. What is theirs? Who are they going to be? And until they answer that for themselves, they're still going to be children. They need to understand where do they belong? Who are their people going to be? Are they going to be church people? Are they going to be political people? Are they going to be arts people? Are they going to be football people? Are they going to be about certain causes or not? Who are their people? And the last thing is they need to understand what are they going to contribute? Now as the Christian parents would go, that is so simple. Who are you? You're God's kids. You belong to the church. Your job is to be a part of expanding God's kingdom. We would love for you to do that. But the deal is kids in order for me to become adults have to answer those questions for themselves. And as they're answering those questions for themselves, they have to push back. They have to rest with those. They have to reject them and accept them and make them their own. And if we make them answer those questions for us, then we've just pushed them away until they're going to go have space to do that themselves. We have to allow our kids to be who they're going to become. If we're going to love them, we have to understand them. Now a chap card came up with this really interesting and I think sad illustration as a parent, but for a kid it's awesome, is this idea of a tightrope. There's this tiny little rope with two poles, two parts of the tightrope next to each other. On the one hand, is the childhood pole, right? Where your identity is fully wrapped in your family and in the child, right? And then you walk across this tightrope and over here on this end of the tightrope is adulthood. You've become an individual. You are your own person. And the deal is basically all the way from birth till 9, 10, 11, kind of in that ballpark, everything about a kid is wrapped up in the childhood pole. If you ask them, "Who am I? Where do I belong? What do I contribute?" It's all family stuff. When you take our middle schoolers out to camp and they all start talking politics, it's like, "Oh, now we know what your parents think, you know? We've got a great insight to all that's going on inside of them." Because who they are is fully their parents. But inside of them, there is this desire to figure this out. "Who am I? Where do I belong?" And the chapcark compares, I'm sorry, compares it to this tightrope because it's this thing that we have to do alone. We have to answer those questions alone, which means we have to allow our kids and our students to answer those questions. And if you think about it, mostly, it's usually the mom climbing up the childhood ladder and holding on to their kid for a dear life going, "Don't go!" And the kid's like, "No, I got to go." Because it's so sad, every single thing that the mom does, it's identified with childhood. So as the kid is trying to become an adult and the mom is holding on for dear life, you're almost kind of working at odds with each other because the kid is trying to understand who they are. And for moms, if you've had 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, 12th, 25-year-olds, sons, especially, you know, "Why won't they hug me anymore? I'm their mommy." You know, and all of a sudden they're like, "Peace!" Because you're identified with being a kid. But what's awesome is as they walk along this, the fatherhood, the dad in the picture, whatever the dad does with their kid and the kid's developmental process is always seen as moving towards adulthood, right? When you get to go work in the garage, when you get to go camping, when you get to go play catch, whenever you go on a trip, whatever you do with the dad, when the dad and the kid are together, it's seen as moving towards adulthood. And so even more so, right? We need women to go and gather in small groups and pray for your kids and cry as they don't want anything to do with you. And dads, we have to like re-engage and be with our kids and help them answer those questions. But at the end of the day, they have to answer these questions alone. And we need to understand as parents, if we're going to love them, we have to give them space to answer those questions. I mean, think about you when you were 12, when you were 15, when you were 20, when you were 30, when you were 50. You were always changing. You were always dynamic. And if we're going to understand our kids, we have to give them space to be 7, 11, 15, 25, whatever. The second thing we need to do if we're going to love them is we have to simply make space for them. Our life and our church has to be a place where kids are welcomed. This church, if you're an adult in this church, we have to be a place where kids are welcomed. I love the story and the prodigal son because the father, he always made space for his kid. And it didn't matter what it cost him, right? He ran out to go meet his son. He embarrassed himself. The kid who shamed his family, he ran out to be with him and threw a party. Everyone outside of that dad is like, you are an idiot. But the dad made space for the kid in his life. And his older son who goes and throws a temper tantrum, he goes out and gets him and brings him in and makes space. And if we aren't going to be a church where kids are going to experience the love of God, then we have to make space for them. Our kids are totally different than you were when you were a kid. Just like when you talk to your grandparents, when they were kids, life is always different and is always changing. And if we expect our kids to behave like us as adults or this perfect version of us as adults, then we've missed it. We have to make space for them. And what's interesting is another academic from Fuller, Cara Powell wrote this, used the study, the exemplary youth ministry study where they looked at how do kids go from children's ministry, little kids, to adult followers of Christ. What's the secret sauce? And unfortunately, there is no secret sauce. If there was, she would make a billion dollars. But what they said is we feel like we have mostly the secret sauce. And she wrote this incredible book called Sticky Faith. And in Sticky Faith, she looks at three things that the church can do if we want to help kids go from kid faith to adult faith. And basically, all three of these things are about simply making space for our kids. The first thing that she says is that kids need a connection to the larger church. We can't just keep kids in children's ministry. We can't just silo them in student ministry and then hope that there's one day going to be part of the adult community. Our kids have to belong to this body. And we as adults have to see our kids as them belonging to us. And I mean, look at them, they're texting right now. They're not even paying attention. It's okay. We love them. We care for them, right? Bix is wearing a hat in church for Cara Loud. It's okay. Bix, we're glad you're here. I mean, think about it for you. You're wearing jeans. 50 years ago, you could never wear jeans in church, right? We need to make space for our kids. They're going to have different values, different morals, different visions and compassion and dreams and causes that they're going to get all excited about. And if we make them live into us, it's not going to work and we have to see them. And what's so funny is it's so easy. I mean, I'm a youth pastor and even still sometimes I think, oh, our students, they scare me. They intimidate me. They just give me these blank looks all the time. It's okay. I'm getting used to it. And so we freak out. But when we freak out, we're not making space for them. I love Alan Jones because, especially when our freshmen now, but when they were sixth graders, they were terrors, full terrors. They terrorize children's ministry, terrorize our junior high ministry. But Alan goes, I'm not scared of these guys. And who cares if they take a thousand donuts every single day? That's okay. Actually, Alan's like, that's not okay. So you know what I'm going to do? These guys, they're going to be my donut sheriffs. And he got these total hoodlums that I'm like, they're hoodlums. There's no, there's no space in the kingdom of God for them. And I'm the youth pastor. And Alan goes, no, they're my people. And he says, all right, you, you, you, you are my donut sheriffs. You don't get to eat unlimited donuts. You're going to make sure no one else eats donuts. Oh, how cool is that? Every kid's dream. None of my friends eat donuts. And then he hooked them up with these bag of donuts every week. That was their bag of donuts. And because of Alan, these hoodlums, actually, this was their church. They were seen by adults. They weren't like, get out of here, you dumb kids. Pay attention. They were seen. They were given a place. And they were known. And our kids have to be seen. That's why we encourage our students to come and sit in church, even though it's long and it's boring and it's awful. But they have to be a part of the adult community. Because when they're done, they don't like, this is what adult faith looks like, sitting in a room like this. And we got to get, learn how to do that. And so we encourage our people to do that. So the first thing we have to do is they have to be connected to the larger church. The second thing is this idea of five to one relationships. Back when I started Youth Ministry, it was really simple. You, as the adult, would take three of our kids, they'd be your small group and you would love them. And you would love them. You'd pour your life into them and then, well, it never ended that well. And as they looked at the, they looked at the secret sauce, they wondered, what is the secret sauce? They realized it's five to one, not one adult for five kids, but it's five adults per one kid. And when five adults who know God, who have an authentic relationship with God, who are working out their faith and who know and love and see that kid, five adults in a kid's life who do that, that kid's chances of knowing Jesus when they're adults goes through the roof. And if you think about it, right, you have mom, mom and dad, mom, mom or dad, right, you got your children's ministry people, you have Martha Palm, who's in there, loving little kids every week, weekend, and week out, right, you might get a small group leader in there, you get Susie Dillon in there, you get Matt in there, right, you got Alan Jones in there. You just simply need as an adult to be one of those adults, to see kids, to not just see them as hoodlums, the way that they go from hoodlums to followers of Christ is when you as an adult, see them, make space for them, and care for them. And we need to have five to one. We need to make sure there's five adults caring for our kids. And the last thing is that we need to have a gray space gospel. For almost three whole generations, it probably goes back farther than that, but I don't want to think back with that far and none of us were alive then. But for at least all of three generations, the version of Christianity, you kind of went something like this to kids. Read your Bible, don't let us catch you drinking or having sex with your girlfriend, and if you do you're booted. That's basically, and then if you didn't do those things, you at least got to be self-righteous to everyone who did. Those were kind of the two ends of the spectrum. And we've seen for generations now, people were rejecting that and running away because everyone knew everyone was fakers. Everyone knew that for the bulk of the people and their adolescents in their 20s and 30s, they were wild and out of control and then came to church and cleaned it all up. And then for the ones who didn't, got to feel self-righteous. And that version of Christianity is not going to fly anymore. The version of Christianity that flies is a gray space gospel. It is a gospel about people who know and love Jesus, about people who are daily working it out with Jesus saying, "Jesus, search me, test me, know me. Every day I need to know God's love and acceptance and forgiveness." And if we are every day as adults working that out, then all of a sudden we have space because we haven't figured it out. Once we think we figured out, then we look at those hoodlum kids and we're like, "Oh, look at those guys. We forget where we were." But if we are always working out our faith, if we are always leaning into the grace of God, then we have grace for everybody, for the students, for the person sitting next to you, we have grace for each other. And the only way that this next generation of people are going to know and love Jesus is if they're welcomed and made space for a church, if there's adults five to one making space and looking for them and caring for them, and if the gospel that we preach is one of grace and transformation and not of behavior management. So if we want to love the way that the Heavenly Father loves us and we want to love our kids the same way, we have to understand them and we have to make space for them. I have five or six, I always lose count because my numbering didn't work on my word processing, but a few practical ways that we can actually pull this off. If you think how in the world do we love our kids, how in the world do we understand them and make space for them? Here's a few things that we can do. The first thing is just a mental shift. We need to understand that children's ministry is your ally. Downstairs are not people to be avoided. They're not the people, oh, another call from Stacy. I'm sick today. That is not okay. That worldview does not help. If we wanted to, we could take all of our kids and throw them in a room, put on a veggie tails and wait for you to come and pick them up. And there's plenty of churches that do that. We decide we do not want to do that. We want our kids to be seen and known and loved by the adults. Do you know it takes over 120 adults to love and care for your kids, for the over 200 kids that come up through children's ministry every month? That's a lot of kids. And so when we want adults, we're so thankful for saints like Martha Palm, but we're also, we need adults who are so tired of their kids and want to break, but we need you guys too, because you as an adult see your kid. And because we're selfish people, you care about your kid and you care about your kids and who's interacting with them. And when you're in children's ministry, now you see who your kids and who your kids' friends are. And now you get to be an adult who knows the name of another kid and sees them and cares for them. And now when you see them grabbing a thousand donuts, you know them and you can laugh with them, give them another donut, not for their mom, because you're my kid, you got to cut that out. But for other kids, you give them all the donuts you want, right? But children's ministry is your ally, student ministry is your ally. And we get, we don't do it perfectly, we get sometimes when you're fourth and fifth grade, it's so boring. We get when you're an eighth grade, junior high group is so boring and childish, we get when your senior youth group is so dumb, we get that. But if you bail on us and they go across that type rope and bail on you and now you're an idiot and the church is an idiot, then it's awful for your kid. So we are allies and we are partners. The second thing is do not give up, you have to fight. You have to fight, you have to fight. These are your kids, these are our kids. We don't just go, oh you've hit puberty now, now you can make every decision you want by yourself because you're taller than me. That is not a good call. That will not help them. They are, they are kids. And not you guys, you guys are very mature and don't need to hear any of this. But most of the kids out there, they are kids. They're trying to figure out friendships and relationships and morals and values. They're figuring it out and a freshman in sophomore high school has not figured all that you guys have of course. But most junior freshman sophomores haven't. We have to fight. And here's the deal, if you are paying for any part of their livelihood, you get a voice into their life. Sorry guys, get a job. And here's the deal. I hear this all the time, oh my kids doing blah blah, what do I do? Take away their phone. Here's the deal. The phone is the only thing they care about. And if you're going, oh that's off limits, then you've lost. So unless they're going to pay for their own phone, get a job and you can do whatever you want. You have to fight, do not give up on them. And here's the awful truth. Do you want to know when the fight that ends the war? Do you want to know when that takes place? It's not at 17. It's not at 13. It's not even at 11. It is at second or third grade. The battle that determines the war is at second or third grade. And then the residue of that kind of spills over over the next couple of years. It's at second or third grade that you get a picture for the church that is bigger and broader than children's ministry. That is bigger than broader of this one thing. Think about it. How many of you use your fourth grade? I don't really want to go to school today. I don't go to school today either. We have core values. We have things we want. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we value education. No fourth grader gets to go their parent. I'm not going to school today. No 17-year-olds. I'm not going to school today. By 17-year-olds. Actually, that does happen. Even Tommy did school and told everyone on Facebook. Can you believe that kid? I know. Facebook. Don't put it on Facebook. That's what I'm saying. But the deal is you get to choose the manner in which church is, the way in which this community is. And it's in second or third grade. We and our family go to church. Our kids hate that they have to come to church at 8.15 or here until 12.30. They hate it. They don't get it. We get an opportunity to go, "Yep. Your dad's a pastor. That sucks. And maybe we can run away from the church and then you can figure it out." Or we go, "Oh, this is kind of our lot. This is what we do. This is as a family." Just like you wake up every day to go to school, we do this. And we get it painted however we want. But the way that you paint it, the battle that you fight is in second or third grade. So don't give up. Fight. You have to fight. Now, the flip side is also true. If you lose and you're going to lose, you have to surrender well. The whole point of going from a child to an adult is the kid has to figure out for themselves who they are. Who are they? What are their convictions? Where do they belong? Where are they going to contribute? They have to figure out on their own. At some point, they are going to push back. At some point, the son says, "The father, give me what I want. I wish you were dead." And at some point, the father has to say, "Here you go. We have to surrender well. If we surrender with ultimatums, if we surrender with making it harder and narrower for them to come back, they will never come back. We all know gazillions of people who have been given ultimatums and are like, "Well, define. I don't need it." And they don't come back. If we are going to lose and you will lose, we have to let our kids go and we have to surrender well. We have to make the widest possible on-ramp for them to come back. I love the father and the story. I mean, he had every right to sit in his house, wait for his kid to come and beg and to make his kid be a servant. And if a kid was servant long enough, then his kid could maybe be back in the family. But the picture we get of God is the God who runs after us with all of his might disregarding all of shame and embraces his kids and loves them. And we love that. We soak it up for ourselves. You think we could do that for our own kids. If we are going to lose and we will, you have to get surrender well so that there is a very huge and very wide on-ramp. I mean, you know, anyone who said when you were a kid and said, "If you do this, you can never bother." You didn't care. You didn't know what that meant. So don't put that trip on your kids also. All right, we're almost done. This one's really hard for me. We have to love our kids for who they actually are and not for who we want them to be. We all have dreams for our kids. We all want them to be the better version of us. But they are different people. They are unique people. They have different gifts and different abilities and we have to love them for who they are and not who we want them to be. They're going to engage God differently. They're going to do something that you never thought in a million years with their life. They're going to choose careers that you would never choose. They're going to pick jobs that aren't going to pay well. They're going to fail out of college. They're going to do all these different things and you're going to freak out. But we love them for who they are. I had these friend of ours when we lived in Napa and the mom and dad were both doctors and they became Christians when they were adults. And I got all fired up. If you became a Christian's adult, you're like, "Oh, I get it." And then you become like super legalistic because you want to figure it all out. And they had these kids like our parents jacked us and we're going to teach our kids everything about the Bible. And they laid it all down in their super doctor scientific model for their kid and laid it down, laid it down, laid it down. And the total bummer was their oldest daughter was an artist, a free-spirited art major. And she loves God. Loves God. But she's an artist. I'm not an artist. I don't get artists at all. And you take this artist, this free-spirited artist who kind of has a different way in which she engages God, a different way in which she engages life. And these doctor parents who have a way that it made sense to them because they just became Christians and they crushed their poor daughter. They crushed her. Now what's so awesome is these people love their daughter and figured it out. And we're daily learners to figure out how to love their daughter. And ultimately they worked it out and have a great relationship. And the daughter and them will never go the same kind of church. But both of them love God in their unique way. And we have to be people who love our kids for the unique creature that they're becoming. And to love them and empower them in that. And here's the last thing and this is the hardest one. It's super easy slash super impossible and it's this that your kids will become you so you better get whole yourself. I love working with students because they have the best BS detector. They know when you're saying one thing and doing another thing. Little kids, not so much. But as they get older, they can tell. And if you give them the churchy line and the churchy rules and the churchy logic and the churchy stories and the churchy punishments, but you and yourself are not working out, they can immediately smell. That's garbage. They will become you. They will share your values, not your spoken values, not the values that you try to present to all of us good churchy people, but your very true values. They will become those. And so if you want your kids to be lifelong learners, to be humble, to be teachable, to be people who daily need Jesus and love him and follow him and run after him, then you as an adult need to do that and model that. It's so embarrassing to have to sit on my son's bed probably twice a month. I should do it every day, but I only have the guts to do it twice a month and go, oh, I totally screwed up. I came off way too hard there. Totally like a jerk. I did not mean to do this. I did not mean to do that because he's going to get, I'm not a good Christian. He's going to get, I'm not a good version of the gospel that I want to present to him, but maybe he will at least get that I'm a learner and then I'm humble and then I'm broken and then I need Jesus. And if he just gets that, wouldn't that be great? So we have to do the hard work ourselves. We have to be people who get it, who run after it and who work it. We love being the prodigal son we love it. Every day we love coming back to Jesus. But my hope and my prayer for us as a church is that we would not forget how wild we were. What adolescents look like for us? What our 20s look like for us? And for some of us who didn't even go through that or down that to not be self-righteous. We have plenty of other broken areas. And when we know our brokenness, when we know our need for a Savior, our daily need, not that one awful thing I did 20 years ago, but our daily need for a Savior, we have all of the space and grace for our kids who are trying to work it out, for the person sitting next to us in the pew who's still trying to work it out. Man, may we be a church of people who are grace-based, who live and move towards a gospel of grace and transformation because our world desperately needs that. Our world does not need more self-righteous people who don't drink. They need transformed people who just drink good scotch. I'm just saying. It's all right, I'm going on vacation for a long time. All right, let me pray for us and then we'll wrap it up. Heavenly Father, you are such a good God and we get in our head that you love us and you've saved us and you've freed us and you run after us and you embrace us and bring us into your family. We love that. But God, may we mature, may we grow so that we don't just take on the mantle of the prodigal son here, but God, may we take on your mantle, may we take on the mantle of the Father in this story who makes space for their kids, who understands their kids, who fights to the death for their kids and when we've lost God, we surrender well. And when we have lost God, may we be the sort of church, the sort of Christians who stand at the edge of our property anxiously waiting for any sign of return. And when they do return, God, may we be the sort of people that run, that throw shame and caution to the wind and embrace the prodigals in our life and hold them and care for them and kiss them and throw them a party. And if the next week they do it again, maybe we run after them again, you do that for us. May we do that for our kids. May we love our kids the way that you have loved us. Amen. And amen.