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Brand newWhen a new baby comes into the world, his or her needs must all be met by someone else. Newborns have no ability to help themselves, and if a baby bottle of nourishing milk was lying an inch from his or her mouth but wasn’t fed by someone else, the little one would starve.

Because of that complete helplessness, parenthood is a massive undertaking. Moms and dads can choose to do a thorough job or none at all, though thankfully most choose wisely and care well for their little ones.

 

Deciding what she'll hearSlowly but surely children take over the pieces of their lives, starting with holding up their own heads. Later they sit, crawl, walk, and feed themselves. But for many years, what they see, hear, taste, and touch is controlled by parents.

Why did God set it up this way? Why are babies so helpless and parents so powerful?

Surely he wanted families to bond, and serving the needs of another is a good way to start. (Babies are especially good at forcing that one.) But the best possible reason God did it that way was his wanting us to mimic his fatherly role in our earthly parenting so we’ll better understand why he fathers the way he does. That reasoning works with both the pluses and minuses of a parent-child relationship.

As parents we learn to love our children intensely (as he loves us) and discipline them fairly (as he does us). We figure out how to provide for our kids (as he provides for us) and learn to let them make mistakes (as he does with us).

These parenting parallels and many others help us understand God and his ways a bit better than we otherwise might. Even if we haven’t had children, referring back to our own childhoods is a good way to better appreciate our bond with God the Father. And it’s especially helpful when life isn’t going our way.

TantrumWe don’t like the negatives, the same way a child doesn’t like to be told no. But when we consider that most of our no’s to children are for their own good, it gets easier to cooperate with (and eventually appreciate) God’s no’s to us.

And as we let our children pay the painful natural consequences of their decisions, whether it’s a toddler’s or a teen’s poor choice, it dawns on us that many of the messes we still get into as adults are our own doing, too. And God lets us foolishly move into them “for our own good.” Stumbling through miserable natural consequences of mistakes we’ve made is a guarantee we’ll do better next time.

Eventually our kids do grow into conscientious adults. We aren’t responsible for them after they turn 21, but as we all know, none of them are left out in the cold after they launch. Instead, God takes over from there. And what happens after that can be exciting to watch…. in their lives and in our own!

“Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” (Colossians 3:20)    [….which applies to the adult children of God, too!]

Toward the Light

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Rosie Maple MothLast week was National Moth Week. Until I heard about it on the radio, I didn’t know there was such a thing. This year was the ninth annual, established by a handful of moth-loving people in an attempt to increase appreciation for the 160,000 different species of moths.

One of my children absolutely hates moths. When leaving the house after dark, Birgitta dashes through a multitude of fluttering wings on our front porch with screams of distaste and panic. “Get off me!” she shrieks, if one of them touches her.

Loving the light.“What exactly do you hate about them?” I said.

“Their furry bodies.”

“But aren’t they kinda fluffy-cute?”

“Absolutely not!” she said, shuddering.

Maybe the real reason moths are unloved is their nocturnal habits. They join bats, owls, and other scary creatures of the dark. Their butterfly cousins, flitting about in the sunshine, represent good luck and new beginnings. But moths? Tradition has them symbolizing “dangerous attraction leading to unhappiness.” After all, flying into fire to get close to a light is about as unhappy as it gets.

Toward the lightWhy would God program a moth to fly toward light? The answer is pretty interesting. Porch lights and fires weren’t his original intention. Instead, he wanted them to look up.

God gave moths the ability to calibrate their flight paths using the moon as their primary reference point. So the unsung moth should get a little appreciation for being aerodynamically sophisticated. But they get into trouble when they confuse porch lights or fires with moonlight. One expert put it this way: “A moth’s attraction to an artificial light or a fire could be related to orientation, which leads to dis­orientation since the moth wasn’t expecting to actually get to ‘the moon.’ Then confusion results.”

I think of how different this is from flying toward the Light described in Scripture. Jesus was and is the self-proclaimed “Light of the World.” The closer we get to him, the greater our benefits. Unlike a moth becoming disoriented by flying too close to a light, we become more clear-headed the closer we get to Jesus.

Light is light as far as a moth is concerned, and the one light God intended as their guide (the moon) isn’t always the one they follow. When they get burned, it’s too late. Watching this happen, we could take a lesson.

God intends for us to follow only one Light, too, but sometimes we become attracted to people or things that seem just as good as Jesus and his values. When we do that, we get every bit as disoriented as a zig-zagging moth.

Maybe National Moth Week is a good time to make an annual check of our light source. If we catch ourselves heading toward the wrong one, we could reorient ourselves toward the Light of the World and avoid getting badly burned.

Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

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BaldyThis afternoon we celebrated my brother-in-law Bervin’s birthday with a lunchtime party. Between plates of pot roast and birthday cake, Klaus posed an interesting question to Bervin’s grandchildren Ruby (4) and Beck (6). They’d been focusing on Emerald, who is close-to-bald at 9 months, wondering when she would get a decent head of hair.

Klaus said, “Ruby, you were a bald baby like that, too. What’s your favorite memory from that time?”

Ruby looked at him with a blank stare and couldn’t respond. But when Birgitta said, “Probably that you didn’t have to comb your hair every day,” she smiled. “All I did was ride around in a car seat,” she said.

Beck and Ruby

Beck, answering the same question said, “I remember that I didn’t have to do anything.” Of course their answers were fabricated, since neither one of them could remember being a baby.

Most peoples’ earliest memories are from the time they were 2 or 3 years old, but God doesn’t let us remember all the way back to zero. Maybe he doesn’t want us recalling the misery of birth, and every woman who’s ever delivered a baby would call that wisdom.

Baby brain

More likely we can’t recollect babyhood because the memory parts of our brains aren’t fully developed then. Babies don’t have language, either, to describe their experiences. Nevertheless God endowed each one with a complicated brain, all set to go. On most days we take this incredible gift for granted.

What about the brain(s) of the Trinity? Since Jesus was fully human, surely he had a brain much like ours. But what about his divine brain?

Although we forget nearly everything that happens in our first two years and tend to forget even adult memories if we live long enough, God never forgets a thing. Putting him into a memory grid of forgetting and remembering, though, is humanizing the divine. He knows everything about everything, and we believe that. But then what are we to do with the Scripture that says he “forgets our sins” once they’re confessed?

He actually says it 3 times (in both Old and New Testaments). Does this simply mean he voluntarily decides not to remind us or nag us about our past sins after we’ve repented of them?

Maybe it’s something even better than that.

Maybe he literally wills himself to forgetfulness and “remembers our sins no more” (as the Bible says) to make our forgiveness absolutely thorough. And then if Satan should come before him to accuse us, he can honestly say, “No…. I don’t have any memory of Margaret committing that sin. She’s clean on that one” (because of Jesus).

This possibility gives me goose bumps and inspires me to keep short accounts with God. And maybe his forgetting our sins isn’t that much different than Ruby and Beck forgetting what it was like to be babies…

…none of them have any memory of it.

“I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” (Hebrews 8:12)