For the first eight years of my time as a professor at Talbot, I had a weekly meeting with my friend and mentor John Coe. John was my immediate supervisor, being the director of the Institute for Spiritual Formation (a position I now hold). These meetings were often about teaching, but they were also often about things like marriage and parenting and friendship. Our focus was on life with God in this present age and what it means to faithfully navigate our lives with the Lord.

I don’t take this time for granted. I know many in academic positions who have felt somewhat abandoned in their role, with little to no guidance and shepherding (teaching can be a very difficult experience to navigate and far too many are left to navigate it alone).

In one of these meetings, John was reflecting on parenting now that he has adult children. In a particularly reflective moment, John paused and said something that struck me deeply:

What is difficult about parenting is that you look at your action through the lens of your intentions. Children are just experiencing what is going on, but you aren’t. As a parent, you are always experiencing what you do through the lens of your good intentions, and therefore, the experience is colored in a certain way. This is why, when kids grow up and start talking about what happened, it is hard for parents to hear or see the truth.

The more I thought about this, the more it made sense to me. The things we focus on, the books we read, the family devotions we do, the strategic conversations we have, and much else besides are all driven by our intentions to raise our children faithfully.

I feel my parenting intentions a lot. They are ever-present to me. My desire to be present. My desire to “teach them up in the way they should go.” My longing to teach them about the faith in a way that doesn’t end up pushing them away from God or the church. I have very strong and very clear intentions in my parenting, and they are so strong and clear to me, that I can easily assume they are obvious to everyone.

But kids do not see them. Children do not know them. Our children see and experience the event — the fruit — of these intentions, without the rose-colored intentions giving them their specific meaning.

But it is also true that kids don’t have direct access to the events of being parented any more than we do. Whereas parents look at events through the lens of their intention, kids experience these things through the lens of their expectation. Expectations, often left unspecified and undefined, colors what we experience and can leave us feeling unseen, unknown and misunderstood.

Instead of focusing on parenting, however, I want to think about the dynamic of looking through the lenses of our intentions and expectations. Our intentions and expectations are constant in our lives and both color how we interpret reality. Many naively assume that they directly access objective fact constantly, with no subjectivity in their lives, but in doing so they fail to recognize the truth of their humanity and the reality of what it means to be a person navigating the personal realities of our world.

Now, in light of all of that, think about the expectations you develop in the early years of your faith. Think about those seasons early on when everything seems to work and you are filled with excitement, passion, and purpose. In those years, you are captivated with God but often see little of the ongoing sin, brokenness and immaturity that remains in your soul.

This is what John and I narrate in When God Seems Distant, that even though this is exactly what this season is for, it also was not meant to continue. You are not meant to relive your honeymoon. You are meant to move on to what is deeper, and often more mundane-feeling. In our immaturity, this can feel like less, but in our maturity, we should recognize it is more.

But this is all easy to say in the abstract. The reality in the moment is different.

When suddenly you find yourself bored, or just lacking excitement, we naturally look at this through the lenses of your expectation and think: This isn’t right. This isn’t supposed to happen. I’m still devoted and serving but it is no longer working.

The phrase “it is no longer working” is worth while to attend to.

When we say this, we are seeing a sort of equation that we have written on our souls. What these equations reveal is how the flesh has blinded us to the truth and how much we are trying to use God to grow rather than abandoning our lives to God.

But the same is true with intention.

We can be blinded by our intentions because we imagine our good intentions lead us to see the truth of our spiritual practices. We not only see, but feel the strength of our intention — the passion behind it, the desire to be faithful, the longing to have faith — so that we miss how much this colors what we do. Instead of seeing the act itself, we see it through the lens of our intention that colors it with a faithfulness that might not be true.

If you are having a hard time understanding this, try to imagine a pastor who does not see that he is wielding himself and his flesh to try to grow his church. When the end is good and the means (preaching, service, ministry, etc.) are good, we just imagine it must be good. We fail to truly believe that God’s power is known in our weakness, and therefore assume we must find our own power for God in our strength.

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