Adjustment Fatigue

After our oldest 2 children finally fell asleep at 9:00 p.m., I entered the living room to find my wife and youngest daughter also asleep, but in a great cuddle. That is a picture of how we're all feeling as all our family members adjust to the addition of Elizabeth.

Growth inevitably mandates at least some change and adjustment of certain structures, traditions, relational patterns, and leadership styles that might have worked fine before. Up until now, we have been able to use a "man-to-man" parenting style. In many situations, my wife would take one of the kids and I would take the other. Sort of a divide and conquer philosophy of occupying the kids. However, with the arrival of #3, there risks to be one of the kids running free if my wife and I each have just one kid. We therefore need to go into some type of "zone" parenting style. I'm sure that this "aha moment" for me is just the tip of the iceberg concerning how to be a father in a "zone" parenting style in the years ahead.

In my experience in churches, there are certain leadership styles that work in churches of certain sizes, but then fail miserably as a church grows numerically. The typical evangelical church in France has around 50 people. One pastor can possibly know everyone and minister to certain basic needs of his parishioners. However, have a church grow from 40 to 400 in 10 years, as was the case of our current church in Paris, and growth challenges and adjustments abound. One challenge in France is that since there are very few larger churches (and I don't even think that our churches 400-500 congregations is that large in the overall world scheme, but it is large for France), most pastors don't have a leadership style that will work for effectively shepherding a larger church. Some churches grow numerically despite a governing structure prohibitive to growth.

I don't have the time or energy to dig deepr than this right now. But I think that God has some spiritual lessons on leadership for me to learn in the process of fathering our 3 children that I wouldn't have learned with just the original 2 kids that our natural minds had planned and were content with. But for now, it is physically tiring to make the adjustment to 3. I believe that one day I'll actually feel comfortable with 3 kids and the zone parenting style.