Life experiences are all spiritual raw material. Any experience can draw us closer to God or move us farther away, depending on how we react.
The parenting experience is no different. Your faith can grow through your parenting.
Obviously, the fruit of the Spirit of love can grow. Many parents express that when they held their first child for the first time, their hearts seemed to swell like the reformed Grinch's heart. Of course, that love gets tested many times as parents. Hopefully we learn to love in such a way that our love is always firm, regardless of the situation or how we feel at the time.
Which brings us to another fruit, patience. Beware of praying for patience, because you will get many chances to exercise it! Parenting can help us become more patient.
Actually, I could run through the entire list of the fruits of the Spirit and prove how each one can grow through parenting: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These can expand if we follow the lead of the Holy Spirit within us and allow the Spirit to shape us in each of these categories.
Finally, I want to emphasize that fruit of peace. At the end of the day, we want assurance that our child is going to be just fine and will prosper in every way, but that assurance may not be evident. It takes a tremendous amount of trust to hand over your child to God after you have done the best you could, and then you can feel a spirit of peace. Remember that God gifted you with this child so you could care and develop them, but ultimately, they are God's child more than they are yours.
The way I’ve achieved peace is to hear the Holy Spirit’s reasoning that my job is to plant seeds and build a foundation. That’s all I can do. What they do with it is up to them and their own realizations of and interactions with the Spirit.
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