Words can play tricks on us. Years back, I was struggling with a tremendous urge to help one of our sons avoid being steamrollered by a problem. But my son is an adult, so I prayed “Father, give me the strength not to ‘mettle’.”

Raising three sons to manhood has been the most challenging, thought-provoking and enlightening part of my life. Not only has it been richly rewarding, but looking at them as adults, I see them as the greatest accomplishment I could ever hope to achieve as an earthbound woman.

In reading that, you might think these young men “have it made”—that they are living with minimal problems. Not so. And that is where my problem with the word “mettle” comes in.

When a parent raises a child it is almost impossible not to place a great deal of hope on that young life. As parents, our years of experience have given strength, courage and wisdom in varying degrees. We have gained some foresight having struggled so much with hindsight. Our hard-earned wisdom is wonderful, we think, and being perennial givers of gifts it is natural to feel we must give it to our children. Yet, for the most part we have only 12 to14 years in which this works well. After that, the minds of our children are mostly their own. At least, for sure they thinks so.

“God has no grandchildren,” someone once said. How true. The young men or young women we have raised have to go out into the world, enter life’s battles and find their own strength, courage and wisdom. The difficult part for us is seeing them meet with wounds and receive some scars. The truth is, they have a right to their own recovery. In the process, they may find the “God of their fathers.” But some of them won’t.

If the persons who first placed those tiny bundles of baby in our arms could have told us of the sorrow and trauma that could come in watching them grow, do you think we would have passed those bundles back? Hardly! For there is something stronger than sorrow or pain and that is love. Love nurtures courage and strength.

Unfortunately, at the time we receive the gift of those tiny lives most of us did not have a great amount of wisdom. For wisdom comes with time. Our lack of wisdom often finds us doing more for our children than we need to do. It is not our intent to harm. Our actions come out of the urgings of love; we want to save our younger generation from every form of suffering possible.

Some parents do better than others at letting their children learn through trial and error. Others stunt their children’s growth, showing stupendous aptitude for being one jump ahead, catching them before they fall on the hard rock of experience.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said, “Experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.”

We cannot give experience to our children. Telling them of our own and expecting that to suffice simply will not work. What we can give them is patient training and sound teaching while they are young. But the day comes when to love means we will let them go – set them free, giving them the dignity to live their own lives. From then on, the greatest gifts we can give them are to love them unconditionally and to support them with our prayers.

That morning as I prayed for the strength not to “mettle” in my grown son’s life, I was prompted to think about what I had asked.

Have you ever felt God’s sense of humor? I did, upon looking up the word “mettle” to find I had used the “wrong” word. A sister word, “meddle,” meaning to mind someone else’s business was what I had intended to say. When I read that “mettle” is courage and strength (it does not have a verb form), an internal light flipped on.

If as a parent I try to superimpose my mettle (courage and strength) upon the head and heart of my adult child I have gone to meddling.

Surely there is not a parent alive who has not meddled in this way. Yet the best way to give courage and strength to our children is to have it ourselves. If they see it they will want it. But they must be given the opportunity to flounder and fail and to find it on their own.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).