She Almost Didn’t Try Out

Last evening, under the lights of the Benedum Center in Pittsburgh, my daughter stood on that stage as Pine-Richland was named Outstanding Musical at the Gene Kelly Awards. Eight wins out of eleven nominations. In addition to Best Musical, Pine-Richland also took home: Outstanding Crew/Technical Execution, Outstanding Lighting Design, Outstanding Scenic Design, Outstanding Student Orchestra, Outstanding Dance Ensemble, Outstanding Vocal Ensemble, and Outstanding Actress. A whole season of work, answered in one glorious night.

And here is the part I keep turning over in my heart.

Jarah almost didn’t try out.

Her senior year. The first and last show she would ever do in high school. She nearly let the curtain fall before it ever rose. One quiet flicker of doubt, and that ovation might have belonged to someone else. Instead, she said yes to Chicago: Teen Edition, and in August, she carries that same yes to Belmont University to study music and film acting. What a way to close a chapter. What a God who writes them.

I am not telling you this to brag on my daughter, though I easily could. I am telling you because that one trembling decision did not happen in a vacuum. Behind it stood years of something quiet and unglamorous and absolutely essential. We call it parenting.

The forming of a child is the most serious work most of us will ever do. It asks for encouragement and for direction. It asks for compassion and for safety. And yes, sometimes it asks for the hard mercy of tough love. Get the balance wrong in either direction, and you wound. Get it right, by grace, and you help raise a soul who can stand in the light and not be undone by it.

I keep coming back to a man who understood this better than almost anyone.

On May 1, 1969, Fred Rogers sat before Senator John Pastore and the Senate Subcommittee on Communications to defend funding for public television. He was soft-spoken in a room built for shouting. He spoke about the inner life of a child, about brothers and sisters, about emotions, about the anger that rises in ordinary family kitchens. And then he did something no one expected. He recited the words to one of his songs: “What do you do with the mad that you feel?”

By the end, a hardened senator admitted he had goosebumps. “Looks like you just earned the twenty million dollars,” Pastore said.

Here is what Mister Rogers was really teaching. That song is not finally about anger. It is about self-control, the last fruit Paul names in Galatians 5 when he describes what the Spirit grows in us: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22–23). Rogers was handing children the truth that their feelings are mentionable and manageable. That there is, in his words, “something deep inside that helps us become what we can.” He simply did not always say the Name out loud.

But we can.

Because self-control is not willpower. It is fruit. It grows only where the Spirit is at work, and you cannot give a child what you have not first received yourself.

This is why I believe parenting begins on our knees. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28). Not some things. All things. The standing ovations and the silent disappointments alike. Scripture says it just as plainly elsewhere: “When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other” (Ecclesiastes 7:14). Teaching a child to rejoice in the prosperity and to reflect in the adversity, to trust the same sovereign hand in both, may be the most important thing we ever do as parents.

To teach it, we have to live it. To live it, we have to master ourselves, and that mastery has a name around here. We call it Feeding the Good Wolf.

Two wolves war in every one of us. One is fed by God’s values. One is fed by the world’s. We choose, every single day, which one we strengthen. A parent who feeds the Good Wolf, who reawakens to God’s Word and actually lives it, becomes a model worth following all the way into adulthood.

Ronald Reagan said it well: “There is no institution more vital to our Nation’s survival than the American family.” He was right. To save the family, we do not need louder voices. We need formed ones.

Formed people raise children with inquiring minds and searching hearts, children who go looking for what is good and true. The Bereans did exactly that. Luke calls them noble because they “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11). Days later, in Athens, that same Paul stood at the Areopagus and made the case for the One True God to a city full of Greek philosophers (Acts 17:22–31). Truth was never too fragile to be spoken. It was strong enough to be tested.

So let me be honest about something that floored me. In a recent school board meeting, someone said it was not their job to tell anyone else what is good and true. I understand the instinct behind it, but I cannot agree. Good and true are not relative. They are not yours and mine and his and hers. They simply are.

You do not have to be a Christian to see this, but you do have to respect where the American way of life actually came from, and what alone allows it to continue. That is the inheritance we have defended again and again across two hundred and fifty years. If we, the adults, will not teach our children what is good and true, the culture will keep eroding beneath their feet, and they will inherit the rubble.

I refuse to hand my children rubble.

For as long as I have breath, I will speak it, I will model it, and I will teach it to anyone who will listen. I will do it with the gentleness of Fred Rogers and the boldness of Charlie Kirk, two very different men, both now gone home, both yoked to the same God I serve. One taught me how to be kind. The other taught me not to be silent.

Paul put my whole heart into a single verse: “I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me, the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace” (Acts 20:24).

My daughter almost didn’t try out. Thank God she did, and thank God for every quiet, faithful, unglamorous day that gave her the courage to step into the light.

Now go and feed the Good Wolf in your own home. Open the Word for fifteen minutes today. If you need a place to begin, The Family Wins Devotional was built for exactly this. Then do the bravest thing a parent can do.

Live what you long for them to become.

Feed the Good Wolf. 🐺