The first of those and most often used in our house is
1. Can't you please just get along with your brother?
My mother used to ask for it for every birthday and holiday. "I don't need any other gift than for you and your siblings to just stop fighting for one day," she would say exhausted. We would roll our eyes, "no, something REAL mom!" As in, buying a gift would be much easier than that impossible thing you just asked of us. And why does that matter anyway? Except now I'm a parent, and I'm constantly asking my children to stop fighting and to just play together nicely for five minutes! I do get why this mattered to her so much. First, it's exhausting, breaking up their fights all the time, listening to them treat each other so terribly, comforting their cries, trying to convince them to work it out. Secondly, its annoying, seeing how they are all making each other miserable when they instead should be having fun. What they're fighting about is so trivial! And finally, I just want them to love each other! I love them. I don't want to love them separately, I want us all to love each other as a family!!
And maybe God whispers...that's how I feel too. Why can't you just get along with _________... Why are you making yourselves miserable when you should be having fun? Why do you keep hurting each other? I love them, and I love you, and I really want us all to love each other as a family.
Or how about this one:
2. I don't care if you didn't make the mess, I asked you to clean it up!
We've all said this as parents haven't we? And we've all also as grown adults felt the injustice of cleaning up a mess we didn't make, doing someone else's work. A mom at a parenting class asked what to do when she asks both of her daughters to clean the room they share and only one does the work. Should they both get the reward? Should one be punished? She was worried more about the daughter doing all the work and that it might discourage her. I told her, from the perspective of an employer (I was an HR director at the time), her daughter is learning an essential life skill, and she shouldn't take it from her. Overwhelmingly in the workplace this is the conflict; someone isn't pulling their share of the weight. Someone else feels like they're doing all the work, or doing work they don't think is their responsibility. Do you know which employees are successful? The ones who just do the work anyway. It gets noticed eventually and paints you in a much brighter light when you aren't the one calling attention to it. But truthfully, we're talking less here about problems in the workplace and more about problems in relationships and in the world. People are seriously messing it up all the time. People sin and make mistakes and they hurt other people and it all crashes into each other and we wake up to look around our world and wars are going on and people are abusing and killing their own children and we know we've done a lot of bad things in our life, but this was a mess we did not make. Whether it's on a global scale or a mess in our own family or community, its our first reaction to say "but I didn't do it! It's not my problem!" Very few things get my 7 year old angrier than asking him to clean up messes that his younger siblings made. But I ask him to help sometimes because they're too young to do the job well enough, (they'll just smear the jelly around if they try to wipe it up right?) or sometimes I know it would just take them forever and he can speed up the process of cleaning up the toys that seem to cover every inch of our house. "It's a part of being a family, helping each other out," we explain to him. And maybe God whispers the same..."I know you didn't MAKE the mess, but you CAN clean it up, and they can't, or you WILL clean it up, and they won't, and seriously, help a God out here, because I really just need it cleaned up, it doesn't matter who does it, it's part of being a family."
This takes us right to the response I give when someone says "that's not fair!":
3. Life isn't fair.
This is also what I told that mom who was worried about her daughters room cleaning being "fair". Life isn't. And yet, we try so hard to make it fair for our kids. We agonize over getting them all the same amount of gifts for Christmas, we keep score in our heads daily of how much time we've spent with each one and if we give one a compliment give the other one too, and if we are handing out crackers or especially cookies we better be sure to give the EXACT amount to each child so that it's fair! But this really sets our kids up for disappointment, because then they expect everything to be fair. And in fact, we all know it's not. Someone else will get the thing you want before you do. And someone will ALWAYS have more money than you, more stuff than you, more friends than you...fill in the blank. Do you know what happens when kids who have always gotten the same amount of cookies as everyone else suddenly get shorted? They throw a massive tantrum. Do you know what happens when kids who have never even gotten cookies get handed one cookie when others get three? They smile and eat the cookie. You see the ugliness of it, when you're handing out treats to children and someone throws a tantrum and won't appreciate what they have been given because they're so concerned about what someone else got. Why is it so easy to see it as ugly behavior in children, and not when we are throwing our tantrums about not getting that thing we've been praying about that everyone else seems to have? We tend to look fairly similar to that spoiled child I assume as we seem to fail to see what we have been given, only focused on what others have that we don't. And maybe God whispers in the most loving way...your tantrums kind of make me chuckle, especially when your face gets red and you yell and throw things...
And this would lead us to the most simple and also the hardest...
4. Be Patient
I have four kids, and sometimes I'm afraid I'm going to be squashed to death as I'm trying to hand out a snack or treat in the kitchen. Just give me a second to open the box! I have to yell at them to sit on their chairs or I'll never get it open with them trying to pull me down. They're all crying or whining, quite sure they're starving because it's been twenty minutes since the last meal, and it takes twice as long to get their food because they can't just wait. Have you heard of the marshmallow test done by psychologist Walter Mischel studying delayed gratification? They take a child into a room and set a marshmallow in front of them. They tell them, you can eat the marshmallow now, but if you wait to eat it until I come back in the room then you can have two marshmallows. The videos of this will make you laugh as the kids agonize over the wait and my favorite a littler girl who starts eating it before the lady even leaves the room. We can all laugh about which of us even as adults would struggle to wait those few minutes. But this is what God offers us. So often, the better thing is waiting if we will only be patient. But so few times are we actually patient. I always visualize my 4 year old on the floor crying because he wanted to play the iPad, and I had told him if he would just wait 10 minutes he could play. But he couldn't do it. He could not stop crying about the fact that he couldn't have it immediately, so he never got it. This is so simple. Waiting involves doing almost nothing. But this is hard, because it takes faith. We don't often know if it will be 10 minutes, 10 years or a lifetime's wait for the thing we're waiting for. To be patient and believe that something is coming even when there's no glimpse of it on the horizon...you'd have to really trust the person making the promise. And God says "I am trustworthy. I have always been faithful. (And He probably doesn't sharply say "crying won't get you anything!" But I sure do, and it holds true in this context as well.)
Finally, I've only said this a few times but each time I have I've heard it bounce back right at me...
5. You'd help me most if you would do what I asked you to do, not what you want to do.
My kids like to help. And sometimes I ask them to do something to help a situation, but they have already decided how they would like to help so they do that instead. It's always one of those, thanks-but-no-thanks kind of moments where they have instead now made the problem worse in a way they could not see from where they were standing. Like when someone comes running in to help clean up a mess and steps in it instead. "Nope, could have gotten the paper towels myself, just wanted you to keep your sisters out of here so they wouldn't step in it, but since you are all now are covered in poop, thanks for helping..." Sometimes, it's not even that they made it worse, just that it would have been BEST had they done what they were asked to do. We were each put here with a purpose, and as a part of a "family" we each have our tasks and roles and things God has set us here to do. But sometimes we don't like this particular task. Sometimes, it's pretty quiet and in the background when we'd rather be in the spotlight or the center of the action. Sometimes, we're wanted on stage when we'd rather be scrubbing a floor all by ourselves. Often actually, I think we are asked to "help", to do our part in ways that we don't want to or don't particularly enjoy (or don't THINK we will anyway). But for the most part, we can chose. We can embrace these roles or we can try to help in the way we want to. Sometimes, maybe we make it worse in a way only God could foresee. Sometimes, maybe we're still helping, but there was a better way we'll never know. It's easy to tell once it's over, you're either covered in poop or your not.
We'll spend a lifetime learning and relearning these lessons that we try and expect our small children to learn. We'll be much harder on them when they get it wrong. And we'll expect them to trust us when we constantly fail them. But God is patient with us. He won't be hard on us when we get it wrong for the hundredth time. He won't be annoyed when we don't trust him even though He's never failed us. He is our perfect Father, who gives us exactly what we need, no more and no less, to become holy. He probably won't give us everything we want or even what we think we need. He will comfort us and cry with us when we are disappointed or sad. He will continue over and over again to encourage us to get along with our brother. And He will keep asking us to help in the way He knows is best. And yes He could do it better and faster Himself but He knows it's good for us and we like to feel important. So the next time these familiar phrases float off my tongue without a thought, I'll take the lesson to heart, and I'll try to show the same understanding to my children that God does to me as I try and fail and try again. And I'll pray that some of the time, with His grace, I'll get it right. And I might just learn I really do enjoy helping out my brothers and sisters...
