Disappointed

I read this this morning.  I thought it truly pertinent to the larger discussion we have been having as a church.  Enjoy! Disappointed by Skip Moen, D. Phil. Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.  Proverbs 22:6  ESV Train up – In the movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio takes on the task of reconfiguring the thoughts of a man who is about to inherit an empire created by his father.  DiCaprio’s goal is to alter the man’s consciousness so that he believes it is his own idea to break up the empire.  The movie is a masterful exposition of the question, “What is reality?”  For our purposes, one particular moment stands out.  On his death bed, the father speaks to the alienated son.  He whispers something in the son’s ear.  Only later we discover that the single word the father gave his son in his dying breath was this:  “Disappointed.”  Unfortunately, many of us believe that this will be God’s final word to us.  We think that because we have failed so often to live up to God’s standards, He will tell us at the end, not “Well done,” but rather “Disappointed.”  Because we have heard human fathers and mothers say words like this to us, we believe that our heavenly Father shares the same evaluation.  And after all, why wouldn’t He?  He knows our disobedience, our lack of resolve, our broken promises, our defeats far better than any human parent.  Of course He is disappointed! The real tragedy in this kind of thinking is the mistaken paradigm that supports it.  God is our Father, but He does not find us disappointing.  Disappointment implies a standard of expectation.  A parent is disappointed when a child does not achieve what the parent had in mind.  That means the parent endorsed some set of rules or some benchmark that became the measurement of the outcome.  God doesn’t think like this.  God isheartbroken, not disappointed.  What’s the difference?  A heartbroken parent sees a greater fulfillment of life than the child achieves.  This is not about the parent’s expectation.  It is about the unfulfilled potential of the child.  It is about missing the full joy that should have been the child’s destiny.  The focus is not on a failure to meet a parental benchmark.  It is on the child’s abdication of complete actualization. Now to the verse in Proverbs.  “Train up” is the Hebrew verb chet-nun-kaf (H-N-K).  It has two meanings.  The first is the assumed root of the word hek, a word that is translated “palate.”  You will find it in Proverbs 8:7 (“All the words of my mouth are righteous.”)  This meaning connects H-N-K to speech.   The second meaning is “to dedicate or inaugurate.”  This is the usual meaning in Proverbs 22:6.  Training is not discipline.  It is dedicating the child to the full expression that God has placed within that child.  A parent is the child’s best encourager, greatest coach and staunchest ally when the parent sees what God sees and does everything possible to assist the child to see it too.  This is absolutely not about rules or standards that the parent sets.  It is about parenting with the goal of bringing God’s full expression to life in the child.  And no parent can do such a thing without dedicating that child to the way thechild should go.  Set the groundwork for God’s direction.  Set it early and often.  And later, when that child is old, he or she will still follow the path God