Blog

It was the annual school awards celebration and the parents, teachers, and students were assembled in the school auditorium on a warm and humid evening in late May.

Awards were given to many different students for various academic achievements, but the final and most prestigious of the evening was Citizen of the Year Award. It was awarded to two students who embodied the highest values of the school and community the most consistently over the course of the school year.

Of course the students who received the citizenship award that night were happy and excited to win. A local newspaper reporter covering the event overheard the comments made by the award winners’ parents. One student’s proud parents talked about how they worked diligently over the years to instill the right values and priorities in their son with consistent and firm discipline, religious education through their faith community, moral education through charitable activity, and consistent modeling of positive behavior.

Just after this, the reporter overheard the single mother of the young lady girl who won. She talked about how she was pleasantly surprised and very proud of her daughter. Another parent asked her how she had raised such a wonderful and responsible child. “I have just done my best not to undo the goodness I saw in her when she was born.”

Secrets of the Story

I knew before my son was born that he wasn’t mine. I knew that his soul came from the same Heavenly Parent who gave me life. I knew that his soul had been created in the image of God’s Soul. And I knew that I could do nothing to contribute to the perfection of his creation. My job was to do my best to love and care for this precious soul who had been entrusted to my love and care for a very brief period of time.

I’ve known parents who believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with their children or something missing from their children that needed to be added or fixed. I have seen this perspective cause some parents to seek to make their children whole or complete. I have not seen my role in that way, hence the story above.

Each soul is created perfectly in the image of the Creator’s Divine Soul. Our first challenge upon entering this world is that every soul is influenced by the souls of the parents. The condition of the parents’ souls forms the spiritual matrix through which the child’s soul must pass into this world. Most (if not all) parents’ souls carry encumbrances that have disharmonious influences upon the perfect souls of their unborn children. Those influences can be substantial. It is important for us to understand from whence our children’s spiritual burdens arise. They come from us, and not through any inherent lack or defect on the part of our children’s original spiritual nature.

These perceptions have caused me to develop my own theory of parenting which involves doing my best not to do further harm to my child’s soul any more than I already have. I am doing my best not to further screw up the perfect and complete child with whom My Divine Parent has blessed me. To put it another way, I have seen my role as doing my best to shower unconditional love upon my son as my Heavenly Parent has been showering unconditional love upon me from the moment of the incarnation of my soul into this world. Of course I have failed as a parent in this regard more times than I know.

I haven’t done as good a job as I would have liked, but despite my errors I have been blessed to witness the flowering of my son’s being over the years. My errors have been mitigated and at times completely undone to a great extent by the love of his mother, relatives, friends, teachers, angels, and others who have loved him along the way. Along with all of those with whom we have been blessed to travel, I have also had to depend greatly upon my Divine Parent’s help in loving and caring for my son. Ultimately I know that my son is who he is because of who God is and what God gives and does.

There is only One Parent who can give each of our children what is needed to fulfill the unique destiny that was encoded into their souls at the moment of creation. That parent is The Heavenly Parent of us all who continuously showers Unconditional Love upon each and every precious child. May we each strive to be the models of unconditional love that will guide our children to accept the Unconditional Love that flows from the gracious heart of our Divine Parent.