Heather Choate Davis

In our post-everything culture, obey has become a four-letter word. Obeying is for wimps. Obeying is for people who didn__ do well enough on their SATs to write their own rules. Only the weak and the feeble and the young_-well, not even the young anymore_-need to obey. Funny, because the root of the word obey is from the French verb meaning __o listen, or to give ear to._ It was never intended as a militant word, but one of hearing, of understanding. Of getting it. For a world obsessed with staying in constant communication, we aren__ really very good listeners.

Even if we__e never been inside a synagogue or a mosque or a church__ven if we have, and vowed never to go back__eep down in our striving hearts, beneath all the ambition and the fear, we suspect that we were made for a different sort of life.

America is a young country, young and brash and prone to errors. Like teenagers. For all our inherent goodness, we__e been cursed with bright, shiny object disease and we don__ want a cure. Not now. Not till we get our little taste, till our kids get theirs.

We love Christmas presents but not Christ; Easter baskets but not crosses. We want to tell our friends with cancer that we will pray for them (we don__) and our puddle-eyed children that their goldfish have gone to heaven (doubtful). When we lose our jobs we want to take comfort in the idea that God doesn__ give us more than we can handle, but really, how can we? We have absolutely no idea what God has given us or what it might be for. We haven__ talked to Him in ages.

When God says hold up, wait, pray, it__ not your time yet, our entire bodies rebel, legs kicking and flailing like some overturned dung beetle certain that if we try hard enough we might be able to gain a little traction on our own

Our own egos are so fragile we cannot bear to give our lives to the raising of children only to have them become ordinary people. There, I said it. The worst thing a 21st-century child of interesting parents could be: ordinary. Like us.

Did you notice there aren__ any average kids anymore__nly Gifted and Disposable?

The attempt to prevent our kids from struggling for fear it might scar their permanent records is, instead, scarring them for life.

We fluff them and fold them and nudge them and enhance them and bind them and break them and embellish them beyond measure; then, as we drive them up to the college interviews that they__e heard since birth are the gateway to the lives they were destined to lead based on nothing more than our own need for it to be true, we tell them, with a smile so tight it would crack nuts, __ust be yourself.__

I can__ hear God__ voice for my kids, but I can watch and listen and pray and adjust and try not to screw up whatever He has planned for their lives. And although I can__ make them listen to God, or even want to, I can plant enough seeds to swing the world in their favor. That said, as I navigate my day surrounded by the parents of gifted children (did you notice there aren__ any average kids anymore__nly Gifted and Disposable), here__ where I get confused: if a person believes in gifts but not in God, then where__s they stand in daily admiration of their child__ emergent uniqueness, their heart swelling with pride and joy and, yes, gratitude __here, then, do they send the thank-you note?

We fluff them and fold them and nudge them and enhance them and bind them and break them and embellish them beyond measure; then, as we drive them up to the college interviews that they__e heard since birth are the gateway to the lives they were destined to lead based on nothing more than our own need for it to be true, we tell them, with a smile so tight it would crack nuts, 'Just be yourself.