Welcome back to Beyond the Pew. Today I’m going to talk about what do we do as parents when our kids have lost interest in the faith.

And one of the things that is the most powerful in my life has been something that I kind of actually started in response to this for families and for loved ones who have people that they know that have stepped away from the faith or strayed from the faith. The best example that we could come up with was St. Monica.

And so St. Monica, her son Augustine was as far away from the church as anyone could be. And she worked and she prayed for years until finally he came back to the church. And then she prayed for years for her husband to come back to the church. 33 years in total for two people to come back to the faith.

And I know as parents for some of us we get so impatient if it’s just been a couple of months that our kids don’t really want to go to youth group or we’re making them go or it’s been a year that they aren’t interested in their faith and maybe your kid graduated from high school last year and it’s like as far as you know they haven’t gone to church at all their entire freshman year at college. So what do you do?

If we take a cue from Saint Monica, we need to be patient. We need to trust that God loves these kids more than we do. As a parent it’s hard to think that that’s even possible. How can God love my kid more than I do? But I guarantee you he does. So we need to trust that he knows what he’s doing. You know we need to trust that whatever we’ve done is what we can do.

And if your kid still has an avenue for you to speak into their faith life, definitely utilize that. But you don’t want to hound them, and you want to trust in God. So we need to be patient with everyone else’s faith journey because our journey is not the same as someone else’s. Where God has us on our path is completely different than where our kids are going to be. We can hope that that path will be shorter and better and different than ours, but in the end we need to be patient and we need to be trusting.

St. Monica prayed fervently for 33 years for her son to come back to the church, and he came back with a vengeance. He came back and became one of the most venerated Saints that we that we know and developed some of the deepest theological teaching that we have in the church. We can only hope that that happens with our kids. But we don’t even care about that to be honest we just want them back.

So we will continue to pray for you and we’ll see you next time at Beyond the Pew. God bless

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