“The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it, will eat its fruit.”

Proverbs 18:21

It seemed the moment I became a dad, well meaning people warned me of a turbulent time that lay ahead. Pam and I would introduce our wobbly toddlers to people and inevitably they would say something like this, “Enjoy them now, because one day they will be teenagers.” With a plethora of proof, these older adults would raise the flag of impending doom for the seven-year period that was ahead for our two kiddos.

Pam and I never believed them, though. We started telling ourselves that our teenagers were going to be a great joy to us just as they were when we took them home from the hospital after adopting them both. These harbingers of gloom apparently forgot that babies and toddlers were challenging in their own right. Late night feedings, exploding diapers, vomit on carpet, and tantrums at Wal-Mart could not be the best of times, right?

So, we inched toward the ‘terrible teen” years with guarded hope that we were right and the negative parenting prophets were wrong. We were right. Our two teens did not transform into sub-human droids of destruction when they turned 13. Puberty was not the apocalypse, after all.

Now, before you dismiss me as the pastor painting his kids as perfect, allow me to digress. Our kids are normal and they are teenagers, which is indeed, possible. Our kids test the boundaries of our rules, like your kids. Our kids would rather gorge on junk food than healthier options, like your kids. Our kids do not like early morning school routines, like most other kids. Our kids have spiritual questions and even doubts, like most other kids.

Pam and I could write volumes on what we have learned NOT to do as parents, but one thing we have done well is not believe that our teenagers would be problems without solutions. Every stage of parenting is a challenge that requires more prayer than we think, more wisdom than we can muster, and tons of patience. We have leaned into godly mentors as often as possible and we have certainly paid attention to what our kids watch and listen to in the public media.

We have worked diligently at guarding their innocence, guided them toward life -giving relationships and helped them to see the wonder of the local church, not just its brokenness. We have also realized that our kids will have to make their own choices and some of them may not be best. It is not easy to put your kids into situations where their critical thinking is tested. It is much easier to calibrate robots and send them off into an uncertain world with pre-programmed software.

I wish parenting teens was that simple. Instead, it is a lot like skydiving. We have one chance to get it right and we sure hope it works out. What we speak about our kids before ever leaving the tarmac will go a long way, though, in deciding if there is a safe landing in our future. Speak life now over your toddlers, and when they are teens, they may actually give life back to you.

The following is a short excerpt from my new new book Addicted to Busy, Recovery for the Rushed Soul, which releases in September.

I notice that my best conversations with my kids—and in Callie’s case, the only conversations, really—occur either right when they get up in the morning or right before they go to bed—during typical periods of rest.

Abram is always the first one up at our house. After I woke this morning, I made my way to the kitchen in search of a cup of hot coffee, and there sat Abram—still groggy and with sleep in his eyes. Pam and Callie still were sleeping, which is generally the case around the Boyd household, and as I waited for my coffee to brew, I asked Abram how he slept. It was a benign question—really, I was just filling the silence until my cup was full. But it turns out he slept great, and that he had this amazing series of dreams he was all too eager to tell me about, and that one of the dreams featured a new invention he has been thinking about inventing, and that it really was true, he was sure, just as we’ve talked about for years and years, that one day he would create something that would absolutely change the world.

Abram’s body may have still been weary, but his brain was crystal clear. This came as no surprise to me. Abram’s brain is always clear at six a.m.

My daughter, Callie, is her brother’s polar opposite. She is virtually mute until noon and even then keeps her cards close to the vest. But check back in with her before bedtime, and you’ll have a veritable chatterbox on your hands. At the close of the day, Callie’s thoughts are lucid; she finally calms down enough to look you straight in the eye and string together sentences that let you in.

It’s no coincidence that my kids come alive early in the morning and late at night; God predicted this would be true. In Jewish tradition, the centerpiece of morning and evening prayer services is a passage of Scripture known as the Shema, from Deuteronomy 6:4-9. It reads:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

I loved this passage even before I became a parent, and even more so after Abram and Callie were ours. There is such insight here! God says, in effect, “Love me, and then teach your kids to love me. Enjoy me, and then teach your kids to do the same.” This is what we do when we become people of peace. We reside in the rest of God, and our kids learn to reside there too. And we do this, says the Shema, by using our downtime to instruct them in truth. We are to talk about the Word of God, the truth of God, when we’re hanging out at home, and when we’re traveling across town, and when we climb into bed at night, and when we get up the very next day. You’ll notice that this Old Testament passage assumes we actually have downtime to fill. It assumes that we’re actually talking with our kids each day.

Personal experience has taught me that if I don’t carve out time for relaxed conversations with my kids, they will take the pressing questions all kids have banging around in their brains to someone else. All the curiosities that come with adolescence—who is God? what am I here for? what is sin? why does it matter? what is success? what do I do with failure? does anybody really see me or care?—don’t cease to exist because we as parents are too preoccupied, too busy, to answer them. No, the questions persist. We just won’t be there when they’re finally asked. If we are always at the office and always exhausted when we get home, our kids will stuff their questions until they can’t stuff them anymore. And then the next time they’re over at a friend’s house, they’ll ask that pimply teenager their pressing questions instead. Similarly, if our kid is always at lacrosse practice and barely has time to breathe outside of that, then guess who is going to be answering that child’s pressing questions? The lacrosse coach, probably. Or else a teammate’s mom, the one who always gives your kid a ride home.

God placed our kids in our specific families with the expectation that we will train them in righteousness and truth. We are responsible for teaching them how to think critically, how to behave morally, how to put their faith and trust in a loving God. But we can’t do these things if we aren’t living these things first. In one author’s words, “If you want your teenager [or pre-teen, or toddler, for that matter] to have an understanding of Sabbath, and to understand time as more than a container for text messages and soccer tournaments and term papers, then start with yourself.” It really is true: We can’t give away what we ourselves don’t have.

My new book, Addicted to Busy, releases this Fall.  I wrote the book because, more than anyone else, I need to embrace rhythms and rest. I would love to know if this book is needed in your life right now.

Introduction

In one sense, I’m the worst person to be writing this book, seeing as I’m a complete hypocrite when it comes to actually living out the restful rhythms I so passionately espouse. But in another sense, I’m the perfect choice, because I recognize that digging in my heels and demanding self-discipline will never correct my errant ways. They can’t and won’t correct your errant ways either, which is how I can so boldly declare that this book will not change your life. A book never changes our lives.

Here’s what will change our rhythms, our pace, our lives: revelation from the Spirit of God, or, in other words, the ability to detectspiritually what we’ve only had sensory knowledge of before. Yes, life is made up of tasks on the to-do list, our vehicles whizzing down the road, kids rattling off their incessant needs and wants, the hurried embrace of a spouse who is rushing off to drive carpool, the scent of one more bag of fast food—really, now, who has time to cook anymore?

But it also involves an undercurrent, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, a spiritual underpinning holding together our days. It’s the God story that contextualizes the Us story. It’s a spiritual understanding that makes our lives make sense. The highest goal I can set for this book is that it will somehow serve as a conduit for the revelation we so sorely need. Mere words on a page can’t talk us out of our beloved freneticism, but the Holy Spirit can. And will, if we will let him.

I want this revelation, and yet I don’t. Because on the heels of real revelation, real-deal growth is required. “Revelation is not for the faint of heart,” writes Anne Lamott. But how beautiful it is when it finally appears. Without it, she continues, “life can seem like an endless desert of danger with scratchy sand in your shoes, and yet if we remember or are reminded to pay attention, we find so many sources of hidden water, so many bits and chips and washes of color, in a weed or the gravel or a sunrise. There are so many ways to sweep the sand off our feet. So we pray, ‘Oh, my God. Thanks.’”

That sense of gratitude is what I desperately want to feel. I want to receive revelation, I want to live from revelation, and I want to thank God for saving my sanity, by gently prodding me to slow my pace. And yet here’s a question I think about: would I even know how to live a slowed-down life? Would I know what to do with rest? When I was first handed my newborn son, while I was instantly in love with him, there was this secret question rushing through my brain: “What does it do?” 

Would I look at a well-rested life the same way?

How do I hold it?

What is it good for?

What on earth does it do?

I wonder if I’d be the guy who would unravel with the quiet of it all.

Still, I’m willing to try. I’m willing to put on a rhythmic life. When we know better, we do better, Maya Angelou says, in her unfailingly poetic way. I’ve known better for a long, long time. I’m ready for the doing-better part to begin.

In Jewish tradition, the command to “keep the Sabbath holy” is followed religiously, beginning at sundown Friday and lasting a full twenty-four hours, until sundown Saturday. Friday evening, as a way to welcome the prescribed unplug, the family recites a blessing—Kiddush, it’s called, literally meaning “holy.” There’s a Kiddush cup that you use, which looks like an ornate goblet that’s been glued to a small saucer—a saucer that’s really important, not only in function, but also in form. When the blessing is recited, typically by the father of the family, wine is poured into the goblet until it overflows, spilling out. You can get the cup and saucer for fifteen bucks on Amazon, but you can get what it represents only by living a rhythmic life. The pouring out, the overflow, the blessing—the symbol here as Sabbath begins is that God’s abundance cannot be contained.

This is what I’m after: feeling not empty, but full. Living not full-throttled, but at rest. Letting whatever abundance God has in store for me come in, sit down, be at home.

Take it easy.

Don’t let the sound of your own wheels

drive you crazy.

Lighten up while you still can. 

The Eagles 

Recently, I sat down with Pastor Yvette Maher, a pastor on our team here at New Life, to discuss the role of women in leadership in our congregation. This has been an ongoing conversation here, especially since I wrote Let Her Lead earlier in the year. Take a few minutes to watch this short video and let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.