Testimony of a Rebelious Son

Today, I’m delighted to bring you a guest post by my blogging friend, Jay Lauser, a.k.a. Sir Emeth Mimetes, a young man I’ve appreciated and admired for some time. (Frequent commenters may remember his mom, Sherry Lauser from the discussion threads, and really frequent commenters may remember him, too). Sir Emeth Mimetes has a powerful and encouraging testimony to share with mothers of wayward and rebellious children. May you be blessed and rejoice with hope.

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How many times have you poured out your soul in holy eloquence, passionately exhorting your child to live for God, giving him everything you have, only to stare into those vacant, glazed, stony eyes that mean, “I don’t care what you say,” and you can see how desperately hard his heart is?

I know my mother has.

Because I was that child. Those were my eyes. That was my heart.

She would guide and teach me about the best way to do something, from how to live godly to how to wash dishes, telling me that I needed to trust her rather than my own way. But I hated that, and would reject everything she taught me, merely because it was different from my own idea of how to do things.

I would always reply with unbreakable arrogance, “What if you are wrong?”

And my mother continued to pour her heart into me for over a decade, not giving up on me. She prayed. She begged God to change me. She studied the Bible and every godly parenting book she could find. She examined herself to make sure she wasn’t causing the problem. She poured her life into me.

But nothing happened.

I continued to go on and on in my own path – the path that is the path of destruction and death.

It took God turning my life upside down to get my attention and bring me to see my need of Him. I had the choice between having my life utterly crushed with, or without God. And in that moment, when I looked into my future – and saw me doom, caused by my choices, I repented and turned to Him. And my mother’s prayers were answered.

Or they began to be. God in His mercy saved me from the full weight of the consequences that could have fallen on me, but I am still learning and struggling and warring with the strongholds that I erected and fortified in those dark years.

But what about those years? Were they wasted? What happened to all those lessons, principles, truths, teachings that my mother poured into me? At the time I utterly rejected them. At the time I did all I could to push them away from me. At the time I battled them viciously. What happened to them now that I wanted them? Did I have to start from scratch, all those years serving only to bring me to that place of repentance?

No!

God brought those lessons back to me.

The first lesson that I remembered and claimed as truth was that old principle of Trust and Obey. That same principle that I most viciously warred against and blocked from my every action. I realized that it really did not matter that much whether or not she was right or wrong: what mattered was my obedience to authority. It was not my responsibility to figure out whether she was right or wrong: by doing so I would make myself the leader and she the follower.

I want to tell you, mothers of the next generation: Don’t Give Up. What you see now, the ineffectualness of your hardest efforts, is not lost. God preserves them for that child’s heart: He stores them away for the time when that child comes to Him. And at that time He gives them to that child. And that child can take all those thousands of lessons, those tearful pleadings, and apply them to his life.

I praise God for where I am, for His salvation and transforming power in my life, but I also praise and thank him for my parents. For their perseverance, for their patience, for their passion, for their longsuffering. God knows how hard it was, but I cannot imagine it. I did my dead level best to make it hard, but I was warring against the hand of God, which upheld those two wonderful people.

And I thank them now for continuing to give those years of wisdom and teaching to that hard-hearted young man, for I would not have survived without them.

So, on behalf of my generation and your children, I want to encourage you. I want to exhort and plead with you. Don’t Give Up. God gives you the strength; God makes your efforts worthwhile.

God is on your side.

Jay Lauser, aka Sir Emeth Mimetes, is a homeschooled Rebelutionary writer passionate for God. He divides his time between his many projects and his freelancing web design and development business. He blogs at http://siremethmimetes.wordpress.com.