Permanent MarkersShembull

My daughter wasn’t sleeping.

It was summer. No grades loomed over her. No schedule forced her to rise at 6:15.

To make a long story short, we discovered that her lack of sleep was linked to perfectionism, performance anxiety, and even the potential rejection of her peers. These worries were literally keeping her up at night. I try to express the gospel—the shame antidote of Jesus’s ultimate love via the cross—to my daughter, my little achiever, by stressing soul care. I want her to locate her inner Mary—the one who sits with Jesus and drinks him in (see Luke 10:38-42). Together we scrawled a list of the strategies my daughter could use to improve her sleep, purchased a workbook on teen anxiety, and keep talking about what’s planting these seeds of anxiety in her.

In teaching her to care for the body God gave her, I try to communicate that she isn’t his slave. She’s his daughter.

There’s a weird tension as we raise kids who love Jesus. How can we spur them on to love well and pour themselves out without connecting those acts to their sense of value, their ability to be perfect or perfectly pleasing?

We show them by not falling into these traps ourselves. As you identify your own soul holes, ask God, How might I be passing down these idols to my kids? I suspect the “sin[s] of the parents” (see Exodus 34:7) is passed down not only through a perfect storm of genetic tendencies but, even more, through our own inclinations.

Recently, my parents courageously talked with my husband and me about their genogram—a diagram they’d constructed at a marriage retreat, outlining the history of the behavior patterns (like divorce, abuse, or alcoholism) of their family over several generations. My mom mentioned their rationale for disclosing it: “It’s hard to turn the tide on the sins of the fathers if you don’t know what they are.”

So weeks later, to my sleepless daughter, I said what we all need to say to ourselves when we discover a soul hole: You don’t need to be afraid of not being perfect or disappointing people. Jesus loves you. So you can do all this great stuff to be kind and love people. But don’t do it so he’ll love you. That’s backward. You are loved when you perform and when you can’t—not because of either of those. God loves you because you are his, and I love you because you are mine.

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We hope you found this YouVersion plan helpful! You can read more from Janel Breitenstein in her book, Permanent Markers, available here .