Family Relationships

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Margaret

A while ago a good friend from the Chicago suburbs drove the 110 miles between us to spend the day with me. Maria and I used to pray together weekly before our family moved to Michigan, and we know each other well. After all those years of praying over family members, we know each others families pretty well, too.

When Maria came, she brought a unique gift: a wall hanging representing the importance of family. Somehow she researched all the birth dates of my children and grandchildren, and then hand-made a beautiful work of art that included every name and the day they were born.

I hung this masterpiece near our dining table where it has frequently been scrutinized and also has stimulated many a conversation. And just two weeks ago I had the joy of hooking a brand new circle onto the January line with baby Isaac’s name and date on it.

Only God knows which row(s) will be lengthened by how many additional circles in our family’s future. Maybe he’ll decide to hang circles from our “blank” birthday months (March, November, December). But it’s possible Maria’s display is complete just the way it is. None of us can predict.

When I look at this work of art, I’m impacted by the importance of those circles. Except for Jack the dog (who’s there too), each paper disk represents a human soul that will live throughout eternity. And each one of them has to decide what they want to live for and what, if anything, is worth dying for. Each name has to settle on whether or not they believe in God and then determine which of the many gods available for worship these days is the real One.

But just like those small circles are separated from one another, each individual is seen and known separately by God. He has special plans for every name on the wall and a desire to shower each one with blessings. He has also prepared a few difficult challenges for each name.

God chose that particular group of people to be in the Nyman family, and he wants all of us to relate to one another lovingly. Though we don’t always do that, he wants us to work at getting along, looking out for each other, and sharing what we have with whomever is in need. God wants the Nyman family (and every other earthly family) to be models of his spiritual family in these same ways. Earthly families are to be a mini-version of the Great Family of God, relating to one another with sacrificial attitudes and tough, unshakeable love.

Of course no family can act that way all the time, but we can do it some of the time, and when we do, our relationships will strengthen and our joys abound. That goes for earthly families like the one on my wall, and for God’s much bigger family, too.

I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.” (Ephesians 3:14-15)

Lifelong Learner

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Margaret

No one would dispute that one-year-olds learn fast. In January, I left home for just 2 weeks, and when I returned, Emerald had learned all kinds of new things. Though she’d been good at giving slobbery kisses when I left, by the time I got back she’d learned how to pucker up and lean in with a tender “mmmmm,” inviting the kiss-ee to come closer. She’d also learned to take the caps off marking pens and write on herself, and to pull things off table edges.

Though I tried to keep careful track of her that first babysitting gig after coming home, she surprised me anyway. A water bottle I use while ironing had found its way into her lap, and she’d learned to spray it. I found her dousing herself with one squirt after another, accompanied by a little gasp each time the cold water hit her, followed by a giggle.

Squirt, gasp, giggle. Squirt, gasp, giggle.

When she saw me, she grinned as if to say, “Look what I learned!” Her face was dripping and her shirt soaked, but that didn’t suppress her joy over learning something new. Later that same day I was making my bed, tucking in the edges. Emerald watched and immediately imitated my hand motions with her pudgy fingers.

Although babies never lose their zeal for learning, somewhere along the way the rest of us do. Our perspective is no longer, “I can do this!” but more like, “I hope I can figure it out.”

Maybe our cerebral cortexes have no more free space to make new rivulets. Or maybe we’re just tired. But the truth is, we absolutely must keep learning. If we opt out, we’re on our way to watching life from a chair in the corner.

There is some good news, though. God wired us to be capable of learning throughout our lives and encourages us to do and be everything he’s planned for us. As the Great Facilitator, he can take any daunting task and open our understanding to it as we ask him for help. And if we continue to show a willingness to learn, he’ll continue to assist, eventually smiling along with us when we “get it.”

In my prayer group this week (all of us in our 60’s), we agreed that the more we learn, the more we see is left to learn. To say it the opposite way, if we don’t try, we feel we aren’t missing much. But when we discover there’s always much more to learn, God wants us to relate that insight to himself, that there’s never an end to what we can learn of him, either. No matter how much know, there will always be more.

As for Emerald, she’s done it again. This week she learned to drive!

“Let the wise listen and add to their learning, and let the discerning get guidance.” (Proverbs 1:5)

Can I stop?

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Margaret

One of the delightful pleasures of having babies around is watching them sleep, and one of the sweetest things they do in their sleep is practice their sucking. They’ll suck on bottles, pacifiers, their own tongues, or on mommy, all while unconscious. Sucking is their greatest skill, and we now know they do it even in the womb.

Experts debate about how much sucking is necessary for babies, but all agree it is beneficial. Somewhere along the way, though, all this sucking becomes a negative. Parents of pre-schoolers who have become too attached to their pacifiers or bottles know the difficulty of taking these things away.

I sucked my thumb as a baby, a toddler, a preschooler, and even as a school girl. By the time I was 8, my parents had tried every-which-way to make me stop: pinning the ends of my PJs closed, painting my thumb with distasteful medicine, punishing me, and threatening me with braces. Even dangling rewards in front of me to make me stop didn’t work. I loved sucking my thumb and didn’t ever want to quit.

Eventually I “went underground,” hiding my thumb-sucking behind a book or a long sleeve while in school, sneaking it at home when no one was looking, freely sucking my thumb during the night. What finally made me stop was being caught (and teased) by my peers. The pain of that outweighed the sting of not being able to suck my thumb, and one day I just quit, though the longing didn’t disappear for several years.

God understands how hard it is to break a well-entrenched habit and can see what’s going on in our heads when we’re tussling with our self-will. He thoroughly understands the complicated nature of our brains and appreciates the whole serotonin thing, but he still asks us to work on taming bad habits. “You don’t have to do it alone, though,” he says. “I’ll help you.”

Many bad habits get their start in something good that we’ve taken to an undesirable extreme. Then, when we try to reel it back to reasonable levels, we’re dogged by failure and conclude we’ll never be able to break free. Success can be ours, but probably not until we admit we need the help and cheerleading of someone else. We need “a higher power,” and that, of course, is the Lord.

Once we take advantage of his willingness to partner with us, we’ve taken the first step to becoming the person we wanted to be all along. And best-case-scenario, that habit we struggled to conquer will become only one small piece of a very distant past….

….just like the sucking of a baby.