A few weeks ago, the morning after some squabble I now can’t recall, my eldest daughter and I were alone in the car. A tense silence was still hanging heavy between us. “I’m sorry for how I acted last night,” I said. “It’s your first time to be 14, and it’s my first time to be a mom of a 14-year-old, and sometimes I really mess that up. I spent a lot of years learning how to take care of everything for you. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that now it’s time to learn how to let go.”
As the tension between us dissipated, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the little girl who used to exasperate me by tossing squished grapes off her highchair. How quickly she was gone, replaced with this young woman who is both deeply familiar and not wholly knowable. It is good that she’s not mine to control, I thought. She is meant for more than I can control.
But this shimmering recognition—this settled trusting in God’s plan and provision for both of us—isn’t the territory where I normally reside, despite my best intentions. Organization and direction come easily to me. I can always try a little harder, prepare a little better, worry a little more. And I can always imagine that this will give me the sense of sufficiency and security I desire.
Of course, I recognize the sinfulness in all this. I know how parental anxiety and attempts to control the uncontrollable contribute to our culture’s well-documented childhood anxiety epidemic. Yet every day, like the apostle Paul, I do what I do not want to do (Rom. 7:15). I manage, cajole, suggest, engineer, and solve for the best possible outcomes that I believe only I can see on the horizon ahead.
But God’s horizon is further still, and sometimes I manage to remember it. That’s one of the central messages that Kara Root, a pastor and spiritual director, shares in A Pilgrimage into Letting Go: Helping Parents and Pastors Embrace the Uncontrollable, the new book she coauthored with her husband, Andrew Root, which published this week.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
An Anxious Generation—of Parents
I was excited to come across your book because I both work at a church and am the mother of teen girls, and I found it ripe for discussion. There’s the deep dive into the life of Saint Cuthbert and the travelogue of your family’s 63-mile pilgrimage to Scotland and England. But my favorite part was your diagnosis of what I see as one of the main challenges facing modern parents and pastors: the way our anxiety causes us to grasp ever more tightly for control over those we love. You’ve named at least one facet of this thing we’re all living with—but why do you think modern Westerners are particularly prone to leaning into control as a way of dealing with the unpredictability of life?
It’s hard to answer that in a short way after answering it the long way in the book! I think we often see control as our only tool. It’s given to us at every turn as our remedy, especially on social media. We have a puppy, and I looked up one thing about dogs. Now the algorithms are sending me a million things about how to train your dog, how to calm your dog, how to take control of this or that. It’s very easy to go down any little rabbit hole and try to fix whatever it is that you think is wrong. If we think we have the capacity to control and fix it, maybe it will make us feel more existentially secure.
And everything is moving faster—under pressure to be bigger and more and better—so we’ve got that pressure internally as parents too. We’re always grasping for resources, feeling like if we just had enough knowledge, enough capacity, enough confidence, enough whatever, then we could manage, and we could avoid whatever it is that that scares us, perhaps fear of failure at being a parent. And there’s no signpost you can reach that lets you say, Well, I’ve arrived, or I am now functioning as a good parent. We’re always turning back onto ourselves.
My son just left home to do a study abroad in Scotland as a college junior, and I know he can do this. Yet here I am in another country giving him a checklist and waking up in the middle of the night just texting, How’s it going? How’s the packing? I don’t need to be doing that—but I find that anxiety propels me. In one sense, we are letting go of control. We let him figure it out and get on the plane and go by himself. But inside, I’m still grasping for control. That struggle doesn’t stop.
It’s as if I think that being in control will let me prevent something bad from happening or ensure a great experience. But really, we have no control of anything—but we’re held in the care of a loving God, so when things go wrong, that’s not the end of the story.
Do you see any difference between Christians and our secular neighbors on this? Or put another way, when faced with an unpredictable situation, is the average American Christian likely to respond more similarly to her secular American neighbor or to her African Christian sister?
I’m taking a leap here, but I’d say our secular American neighbor. The culture we’re swimming in, the air we’re breathing, is full of this sense of control and anxiety about little things.
I’m in Copenhagen right now, and we drove into town at 4:00 p.m. Everybody’s just sitting around along the riverbanks and in the parks because this is the time of day that you get off work and you sit around with your neighbors, coworkers, and friends. It’s a different way of life.
This is not an African sister. This is a Danish sibling. But how interesting to grow up in a culture that prizes connection, belonging, and prioritizing something like watching the sunset together. Whereas for us, it feels like we’re going to get behind somehow if we spend time that way—we’re going to lose our way. And plus, who has time for the sunset when you’re running to soccer practice and violin lessons and youth group and whatever else?
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That strikes me as right, but it makes me wonder: What does it say about us that our culture is forming us more than our faith and the work of the Spirit are?
Part of it, I think, is our sense of American exceptionalism—the idea that certain things can’t or don’t happen to us. It’s easier for us to live in this denial of our mortality because we have more ways to feel secure. Although it’s interesting that, as things in our lives or our society crumble, it seems like our existential fear is heightened.
I have a friend who teaches English to immigrants from all different places, and she tells me that they seem to be able to be less anxious even in the midst of objectively higher risk. Many have been through terrible things, and they know you have to keep living in the midst of them—and that life is more than those terrible things. We still have people we love and moments we share.
But as Americans, I think much of our sense of well-being relies on external structures that we’ve created either for ourselves or that have been given to us, and I think the church does that too. Many people want to go to a church that looks like it’s successful and busy—maybe too busy even for them to do all the things that the church is doing.
There’s also a weird sense of shame if we’re not doing all that we could be doing: I could be doing so much more reading. I could be learning another language. I could be learning to invest. It always feels like we’re wasting our time.
But that’s this bizarre pressure that we put on ourselves, and we import that into the church and reduce our faith to an optimization tool. We think about how much more we can optimize with God on our side or how Christianity can give us better tools to accomplish what we already wanted to do. But actually, Christianity is saying that’s not what life is about. It’s about something completely different.
What does that say, then, about the formative power of our faith and the work of the Spirit? I work at a church, and I know our best intentions are to love and lead all people to deeper life in Jesus Christ. Any program we have is geared toward that objective. But so often it seems like we’re going somewhere we don’t intend to go. What’s happening there?
Well, I think part of it is this idea that we can even lead people into deeper relationship with Jesus Christ. The way that that’s phrased very much puts it on us and puts the control in our hands.
I’m a pastor, and the core sort of narrative that has formed in my congregation is one of trust that we all already belong to God and to each other. That’s the foundational reality of the universe that we can’t change. But we ignore it all the time. We fight against it all the time.
In Jesus Christ, we’ve been reconciled to God and other people, though, and so the people we’re journeying with are siblings, not competition. They’re not targets of our need to convert or whatever else. They’re living in the world that God loves, just as we are.
What would it look like if we could surrender ourselves into that reality and actually live like that’s true, like God is already active, already doing something in our lives and in the lives of the people around us? And what if we walk through this world with this anticipation? What’s God going to do today? What’s going to happen here?
That’s really different from putting that pressure on ourselves. Is it my job to make sure that people’s lives are open to the work of Christ? Is it my job to make sure that there’s something transformative that happens in the children’s ministry or in the sermon or whatever else? No, that’s not my job. That’s the Holy Spirit’s job. The idea that we or our church is somehow in charge is so ridiculous in the course of history.
The church has been through so much, and it’s going to go way past us. We just get this one little moment to receive it and watch and join in what God is doing. But if we’re so focused on trying to make something happen, we could be missing God doing something right now.
Turning more specifically to parenting, so much of raising kids well and being in local church ministry for that matter is mundane and routine, not a spontaneous mountaintop experience. I know experiences like that can’t be forced. But you write about seeking those moments—they’re called moments of resonance in the book—by setting a table and inviting a posture of openness to be met by something beyond what we are capable of producing. I love that and have had those moments, but also, what does it look like practically to do this day in and day out when life is sloggy and unexciting? Is there a place for formational practices here?
Often that kind of experience happens where we’re not looking for it. You’re in the middle of an ordinary Thursday, and sometimes every moment is excruciating. Maybe the kids are fighting over music in the back seat of the car. But parenting also goes by so fast, and sometimes it just strikes me, as they’re bickering, that I get to be their mom. We can’t force mountaintop experiences, but we can try to be present in the moments that we have. We can practice, maybe at the end of the day, noticing what we might have missed along the way and thinking about what we can be open to tomorrow.
When my daughter was preparing for kindergarten, she was so excited. Her big brother had already been in school two years; she was ready. She had her clothes picked out in July. But the moment she crossed the threshold of the classroom, she just melted down. There were so many kids—it’s chaos, and it’s overwhelming. She was inconsolable. I just couldn’t calm her down.
I took her out in the hallway, and I was doing the thing of trying to get her to change, trying to control her. Nothing I did was working. I wasn’t meeting her in this moment. But then in desperation, not because I had any great faith, I knelt down and looked in her little face, and I said, “Maisy, God has a surprise for you today.”
She stopped crying for a minute, and her eyes got really big, and she said, “Really?” And I told her yes and that at pickup I wanted her to tell me what God’s surprise was.
I walked out the building thinking, Okay, God, you better show up. I just told her you were going to be there. All day long I’m praying and nervous. But then I picked her up, and she came running over and said, “Mom, you were right. God did have a surprise for me.” I can’t even remember what it was now, but it became our daily liturgy to talk about God’s surprise.
It was always something ordinary. It was ordinary life. And it took me a while to realize we can always expect this presence of Christ in our moments. God feeds me when God promises to feed me, but we have to train ourselves and each other to notice these gifts. It’s about belonging to God and belonging to each other. God wants to give me something every day and care for me, but also we belong to each other. I’ve experienced the presence of God in how we care for one another.
If we stop asking what we need to do to fix this moment, we can instead notice God in this moment.
Yeah, if we trust that God’s really real, we can. But I don’t know that we do. I actually think that’s our main problem in church. We believe God’s real. We’d like to think God’s real. That’s how we aspire to live. But we don’t live like God’s real. We live like it’s all up to us.
What would it look like to actually trust this real, living God—to trust that God is going to do something, is already doing something?
As a mom with two teen daughters who has entered a season where family conflict too often seems to be the norm, I appreciated your idea of “points of aggression” as a way of explaining what’s happening under the surface in our relationships: When everything and everyone is a challenge to be managed or optimized, our relationships with our children and our churches get distorted. I see that play out in a lot of ways, but I also find myself wanting to ask how that works with our real needs for healthy authority. What does healthy authority—whether parental or spiritual—that avoids these points of aggression look like in families and churches? What are some concrete differences you’d expect to see?
Part of our anxiety, including in parenting, is that we are so afraid of disappointing people. Our feelings have been given a lot of power in today’s world. But we have to say no to be able to say yes. Just holding that boundary provides a sense of safety and security for kids. It tells them there are reliable ways to be in the world—that it’s not up to them to figure everything out.
One of the difficulties in parenting today is this idea that we have to create our own identities and curate ourselves in the world. We’ve put that on kids from a very young age. This may be changing in younger generations, but many parents will say, We’re not going to tell you what to think or what to believe or what to do. You have to be you. But sometimes children just need someone to tell them what to do.
Every time our kids would say they didn’t want to go to church, we’d tell them that’s what we do. Our family goes to church. It’s who we are.
If you don’t set that kind of boundary, if you ask them to create their own identities, you’re asking kids to do more than what is their rightful work as kids. And I think what we intend to be gentleness and grace is going to devolve into aggression. It’s like that in our culture. We live in a very unforgiving and merciless society.
But what the Christian story has that the rest of culture doesn’t is mercy and forgiveness. What’s beautiful about the Christian story and about Christian parenting is not that you’ll avoid all these mistakes. It’s that those mistakes aren’t the end of the story. God is already holding us. We get to come back again, and our relationships become stronger because of the apology and the forgiveness and the rootedness with one another.
Thinking back in your family’s life, you’ll see those moments that on the front end or in the middle felt like disasters but ultimately made you stronger down the road. And God’s never done with us. That’s the beauty too. God is always going to do something, through everything that happens. Are we willing to participate in that, or are we going to resist or ignore it?
One thing that’s different about being a Christian is a sense of eschatology too—that we have a God who promises that the end is complete love and connection. And so if we’re in a situation that’s not okay, we know it’s not the end yet. Any one bad moment is not the defining moment. We trust ourselves into this bigger story. We have a further horizon. And I think our culture has made every decision, every moment, so fraught—as though somehow we can control it all. But the truth is we’re held in God no matter what. Whatever happens, even if it’s not what thought you wanted to have happen, it’s not the end of the story.
I see that so often in so many things. Everything becomes higher stakes if you lack this longer horizon. And this is where we often see how formation matters. I’ve also said to my children that we go to church—or do other things—“because this is what our family does.” I have used that same line many times. Sometimes I wonder why we’re doing it. But then in difficult moments I see the effects, and I realize that these practices have formed my children in a particular way.
Our faith is a very corporate thing. We read Scripture together, and we practice faith together, and we show up at church together because this community helps us to be the church. We’re not the church by ourselves. And some days you’re going to be the one feeling it, and other days you’re totally not, but someone else is going to be holding you up in faith. We need each other, and kids need to see that life in community along the way. They need to understand that they’re part of this community that believes and this community is holding them.
