Parental Guidance: the Preamble

I have a lot to get off my chest about parents and parenting. A lot! My perspective and opinions, however, do not emanate from a firsthand experience of raising biological children, as I am not a biological father... yet. The beliefs and principles that I espouse about parenting come from another vantage point: the broken children at the receiving end of parenting gone wrong.

As an introduction into this series of articles on parenting that I have been desiring to write since last year, I want to issue these preambles in the interest of making my intentions clear, and my motives evident.

(1) I AM NOT A BIOLOGICAL PARENT

God only knows how daunting and challenging the task parents are faced with when they have kids, and when said kids grow up and start having minds of their own. These articles are not experiential from the point of view of a father or a mother, but they are experiential from the point of view of a son who grew up watching (and later on, learning from) how his parents raised their sons, and how their parenting style impacted his life.

(2) I AM A SPIRITUAL PARENT

Occasionally important in a person's life is a spiritual mentor who may need to fill the void left by a physically or emotionally absent parent. As a pastor for the past five years and small group leader for the last ten, I have encountered varying degrees of positive and negative parental influence on teenage men, young adults, and even on older adults. An observation I have made over time is that a person's behavior in certain situations or their response to particular crises often reveal how they were brought up. I have also had the privilege and the burden of hearing heartbreaking stories from teenagers who share their ordeal of abuse, rejection, and abandonment from their biological parents.

(3) THE BIBLE IS MY COMPASS

While I may not have the years of biological parenting experience under my belt to be able to go on this online crusade of mine, I do have the correctness and the durability of the Word of God as my indispensable source of truth, the ultimate authority of my life, and the inerrant compass on my mission to shed some light on parenting done God's way. The Bible has always been my guide and has given me potent wisdom to share when counselling the young people who come to me with hearts broken by faulty parenting.

(4) THE GOAL IS REDEMPTION, NOT CONDEMNATION

If you've read your Bible or at least have a functional, Sunday knowledge of the Almighty One, you would know that God is a benevolent and loving Father Who, even when instilling discipline on His children, always has redemption in mind in everything He does; He works to reconcile relationships and restore His sons and daughters to righteousness. On this series of articles on parents and parenting, I might tend to get very emphatic about how I feel and what I believe in, but rest assured that I will try not to be condemning of any one parent reading this blog (God knows I'm the last person on earth who needs to do that). I'd be more leaning towards correction, enlightenment, instruction, and guidance toward how God designed parenting to be.

So with that said, I want to welcome you, dear parent and blog reader, to my series of articles aptly called 'Parental Guidance'.

Stay tuned for the first issue!