Some Thoughts on Parenting and God's Mercy

“Can I be honest?” she turned in the front passenger seat to face me. Her vanilla chai swirled in a cup and she smirked a little. “I honestly don’t know if it’s ok for a daughter to even say this to her mother…”

“Whatever you need to say, I can take it,” I tell her. Surely whatever she’s about to say won’t be any more cutting than the words I’ve said to myself in my own head. 

“I’m...disappointed in you,” she half-smiles, filled with the awkwardness and discomfort of a child and a young woman who knows that she’s about to speak truth to her own mother. She twists her straw in the chai again before speaking. It squeaks against the plastic, filling the silence of the car. “You should’ve known better.” 

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I sat at the table the other night and recounted my story again to a friend. All of the messy bits and pieces. Some things I haven’t thought about in years. Other parts that feel as raw and real as a few weeks ago. This has become a normal practice for me. I do what I can to not hide anything. The amazingness of the Gospel is only shown to be more beautiful by the contrast of the wretches it saves like me.

Yet, even still, there are parts of my story that are not fully mine. They also belong to my daughter. This past fall I shared my story very openly on a few podcasts (which I’ll link below) and we realized that maybe it was time for her to know what is mine to own. So one autumn evening, she and I took a meandering drive into the city, stopped for drinks at a coffee shop, and then I took the long way home so we could listen to the episodes together. Nevermind the awkwardness of listening to my own recorded voice. This was my own recorded voice recounting major missteps in my past as she held a notebook open on her lap. I had told her she could ask anything. She could be mad about anything. She could be sad about anything. There was nothing she couldn’t ask. She scribbled away while we listened. Pages worth of notes and questions. Farmlands stretched and the night settled on the October landscape while I turned on to whatever road I could to make our way back home. How fitting, I thought. The wandering path that eventually leads home. 

By the time we pulled into our driveway and parked under the light of the big red barn, she was ready to start talking. Good questions. Real ones. Clarifying ones. Questions that required humility on my end and some that cleared some things up for her.

Years ago, this story was spinning in the hands of agents and publishers. Once upon a time, it was a full-blown book proposal. Video and all. My agent at the time had shopped it and for a myriad of reasons, it never took flight.

“It’s too sad,” one publisher said. 

“We’ve already filled our slot for a story like this,” another said. 

“You need a bigger platform,” my then-agent suggested. 

And then my now-husband asked me on a date. On a warm summer night, we went from a four-year friendship to more and a few months later, on a snowy hillside in Vermont, he asked me to marry him. Suddenly the notion of writing a book about my mess and former marriage and repentance seemed...less than ideal. So I tabled it. (Or, I shot it in the head. Time will tell.) The timing was wrong. I wasn’t ready. God said no. All of the reasons are mostly irrelevant because this past fall, while sitting in the front seat of my car, I realized how immensely grateful I was that there isn’t a book floating around out there with this story that she hadn’t heard. This story is also partly her story. 

Maybe the concept will someday land on some publisher’s desk again. Maybe not. That’s not really the point. The point is that a story is never really finished, is it? And the perceived failure of a project which I thought would cement my career was really just the mercy and kindness of God to keep me from blabbering on too much, too soon. God gave me failure in a project to protect me from failure in my relationships. This is a greater gift. This is a kinder provision.

He knew I’d need the sanctity of a car ride with my 11-year-old. He knew she’d need the space to process and ask questions. He knew she’d be disappointed and that we’d have to do some relational work to let him heal that. A publishing deal wouldn’t be the answer. Grace and time would be.

So all this to say, humility is underrated, God’s timing is reliable, and our kids don’t need us to be perfect. God is never done restoring and redeeming. It might take years. It might not be over when you think it is. Who knows – I may have more long car rides in my future. I may have more failed book deals that leave me scratching my head. I may have more hidden provisions of God. This is the meandering path that leads us home by his grace. Somehow all of those twists and turns lead us exactly where he wants to be.

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Episode 84 | Kindled with Haley Williams | An Affair Redeemed

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