Do your kids grumble? Grumble means to “mutter in discontent.” Does that describe your home?
Maybe you feel like Moses and Aaron did in Exodus 16.
“In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”
The “whole community grumbled.” That is like two million people. Does it ever feel like in your home the whole community is grumbling?
“I’m tired.”
“I’m hungry.”
“I don’t want to.”
“This is too hard.”
“Everyone else is doing it. Why can’t I?”
“This is terrible.”
“I can’t believe this is happening to me.”
Want a quick laugh about grumbling? Watch this clip of my friend Tim Hawkins called “That’s the Worst” about his daughter meeting friends at the mall. It’s ok to watch with your kids and definitely puts a funny spin on grumbling.
Want to know how to get rid of grumbling? With celebration! The more we celebrate, the less room everyone in our family has to grumble. Create a culture of celebration in your home! A celebration of the goodness of God.
You see, that’s key. We celebrate God. The definition of celebration is paying attention and calling attention to the goodness of God.
And it starts with you, the parent. Try not to get in arguments with your kids when they start grumbling. Was it true the Israelites had food in Egypt and there was a food issue in their lives at that point? Absolutely. Most grumbling has some truth to it. It is hard. We don’t want to.
But hadn’t God also delivered the Israelites from four hundred years of slavery? Didn’t He also part the Red Sea? Didn’t He promise to take them to the Promised Land? The struggles were there, but the goodness of God was also all around them.
Make a practice of calling attention to the goodness of God in your life and in your family. As you do it more and more, your family will begin over time to follow your example and they will see their world differently. They will see it less though the lens of grumbling and more through the lens of the goodness of God all around them.
