I'm probably going to let you down

The good news is I've been practicing on making it better.

My wife, Marissa, has recently been learning from experience that she actually feels much closer in a relationship with someone with whom she has had some degree of conflict. Of course the conflict has to be resolved. This is after all how people interact in the world. When we live in community with other people, inevitably I do something stupid which creates an offense, and that either leads to lasting brokenness in the relationship or I apologize and enter into a process of rebuilding that relationship. When it works it's a beautiful thing and sure evidence that God’s grace has visited my life. True intimacy comes from loving someone even though you are fully aware of their faults, flaws, and sore spots and choosing a relationship anyway.

I was listening to a podcast today as I plowed the driveway and the guest, Terrance Real, is a clinical therapist that referenced the work of Ed Tronik who studied the interactions between infants and their caregivers. Apparently he observed the different connection and relationship patterns of newborns with their moms and caregivers. Out of this research he observed a pattern in human relationship with different phases he labeled “Harmony, Rupture, and Repair.”

(As an aside Terry Real’s well loved book “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” is worth checking out.)

Immediately this made sense to me. What a wonderful way to make sense of the flow of human relationship. My mind immediately races to the constant eb and flow of an average day in the Schroeder household as it relates to the interactions of our 4 children. First they’re building magnet tiles, next thing you know they all hate each other, toys are flying, tears are flowing, and then somehow 5 minutes to a few hours later they’re back to the building with magnet tiles. The beautiful thing about sibling relationships is that there’s no escaping so there’s so much opportunity to practice the pattern of harmony moving towards rupture, and then experiencing the sometimes forced by a parent and other times organic opportunity to repair the relationship. The benefits of this dynamic is actually the fundamental argument I would make to anyone wondering whether having only one child is a good idea.

This pattern is also true, and probably most importantly true in child relationships with us as parents. One of the most beautiful opportunities I’m realizing I have as a father is when I lobby an offense against my kids, large or small, I get the opportunity to circle back with them and model what it looks like to repair the relationship.

Yesterday I agreed to help my kids build a small makeshift table for a “play” they were creating, but instead of that build project happening promptly it ended grossly delayed by meetings, phone calls, stoppers in, and all other kinds of distraction on my part. The kids were pretty disappointed that I didn’t prioritize their project. This is a small deal. But it’s also an opportunity to vote in favor of recognizing small ruptures and repairing them in a healthy way.

More often than I like to admit I lose my cool and raise my voice with my kids. This is a bigger deal, and gives me a bigger opportunity to circle back towards repair. I can’t remember where I heard it but it sticks with me that this alone is the biggest thing we can do to set up our kids for success. Model a sincere apology. Don’t act like we’re perfect. Inevitably we’re going to fail our kids but how we repair the relationship is the golden opportunity of parenting to model how we recover from our mistakes. One of our jobs as fathers is to represent our heavenly father to our kids and when we don’t do that well it’s important for us to circle back and let them know “that is not what God is like.”

One of the most memorable ideas to me in his excellent book “Parenting,” Paul Tripp unpacks the idea that “I am more like my kids, than unlike them.” Put differently, the ways that my kids offend me, is very often the same way that I offend God. I’m capable of a grown up version of the same pitfalls that my kids fall for daily. I’m just thankful that we have a God that has modeled throughout all of history that He has arms open ready for repair. I’ve been reading through the Old Testament in my morning Bible reading and I’m getting the picture that this concept is probably the most prominent theme in scripture.

I guess the good news about all of the times I screw up each week (let’s be real each day) is that it gives me more opportunities to practice repairing the relationships in my life.