Kids & Parenting

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No Greater Love

He was on his hands and knees in the driveway next to our house, pressing the crayon against the scrap of cardboard on the ground in front of him. Jeans folded above his sneakers, head tilted to one side, blonde hair tousled, glasses sliding down his nose in the central Texas heat, he leaned on his dirty left hand and wrote with his right. At six years old the meter of his life was already ticking. There were important lessons to be learned as the foundation for his life was being laid. It may have looked like childish scrawl on the side panel from a cardboard box, but this was serious business. He approached his mission with the confidence of a child, not considering the risk to himself. I observed this powerful scene from the kitchen window. As the mother of this six year old I was only a short distance away, yet we were separated by more than a glass pane. The distance between us was measured by the complications from years of knowledge and experience. My heart ached for the lessons he would have to learn.

Several years earlier I had intervened in a similar circumstance and though my intentions were good, I lacked the wisdom to do what is right for my child. I carried him. I carried him everywhere. When he had too much energy for me I put him in a walker, a circular device that sat about eighteen inches off the floor, mounted on four wheels with a padded seat and a wide plastic tray surrounding him for toys and such. Now these things in themselves were not wrong. My error was in the fact that I never put him on the floor. When he was fourteen months and not interested in crawling, much less pulling up or taking a step, I became concerned and made an appointment with a pediatrician. Tests were made but the results showed that we had a very normal healthy baby boy. The doctor told me in very stern tones to put him on the floor and never use the walker again. This I did with much embarrassment and trepidation. I was twenty five years old and he was my first child. We were a military family living overseas and my husband worked long hours. Life had dealt me some blows and I was still trying to regain my balance. Something in me wanted to keep my baby a baby, soft, innocent, protected and happy. When it came time for him to walk, well he would walk, wouldn't he? After all, isn't walking an inherent trait of all human beings, a natural progression a some stage of their early development? Until he was ready to walk I would just keep him from falling, keep him from getting hurt.

I wonder if that was how Mary felt watching her baby grow from the long awaited Promise delivered in the Bethlehem stable to a twelve year old boy taking risks that shook her to her very core. Asserting himself in a way that said “I have a purpose in this life and I must pursue it." He didn't remember the flight into Egypt to save his very life as an infant, and he wasn't old enough to comprehend the condition of their world and the Roman oppression of the Jews. Danger abounds. "Stay close, Jesus," Mary may have admonished "for your own good. Bad things can happen to you. Life can be cruel."

Standing up now he dusted the knees of his Wranglers, jammed the crayon into his pocket and headed for the front of the house with his sign. He leaned it against the house on the left side of the door and walked away to wait. The sign read, 'All kids can come to the club, big kids, small kids, good kids, bad kids. All kids can come.’ We lived on a very busy street near a major university. On one side of us lived an elderly couple we rarely saw and on the other side lived a family with children too small to come out and play. Behind us lived a retired widower. "God please let someone see the sign and stop by," my maternal heart pleaded. One day passed. He played as usual but every so often he would jump up and run to the window or door looking for prospective club members. Two days passed. Surely God wouldn't disappoint my cherub faced firstborn. I just couldn't bear that. Finally on the third day I watched as with stooped shoulders he walked out the back door, down the driveway and around to the front yard. Without a word he retrieved the sign and dragged it halfway up the driveway where he let it fall to the ground. I met him at the back door. "Mom" he said looking up at me with sad eyes "did you know that no friends would come?" I gathered him in my arms and held him. "I'm sorry, baby."

After the initial moment of disillusionment passed I successfully distracted him with a snack and a promise to spend the evening with his cousins who lived across town. Life seemed pretty normal following that incident and my firstborn recovered to do all of the things little boys do with fearlessness, enthusiasm and an unbelievable amount of noise. I didn't recover quite so fast. His question echoed in my mind, haunting me. The truth was my child had friends at school, friends at church, cousins nearby and an adoring little sister. He was not really lonely, but he walked a little farther down the road in his spiritual development that day, and though he may have not completely understood the lesson that day, the seed was planted nonetheless. Sometimes friends don’t come.

Again I wanted to keep him from walking, though not in the natural sense as before. I wanted to put off his journey on the road to spiritual maturity. Good night prayers were precious and Sunday School was a great adventure, but practical life application of spiritual principles was tedious. There are only a few things more difficult than watching your child encounter the pain and disappointments of life and knowing you must not pad the nest. It is their right to try their wings and strengthen them for the flight that they will surely take. It is our obligation as parents to ‘train them up in the way they should go.’ It is a fact that they will go. The ‘way’ they go, the direction their lives take, is largely influenced by our training. Letting our children experience the bitter as well as the sweet under our watchful eye is necessary if we expect our little ones to live the gospel we love. The parent who fills every gap, buys every trinket, and softens every blow, doesn’t allow that child to experience real life. In effect that parent is stealing some real victories from their child, the victories that are won in battles that develop maturity.

The boy shepherd on the Judean hillside had some bad days of his own. It was without any help from the grownups, but a lot of help from God that David was able to kill the lion and the bear. (I Sam. 17) Having strengthened himself in the Lord in these battles, David was confident as a teenager to call out, confront and slay his Goliath. Garth Brooks is quoted as saying, “Too much credit is given to the end result. The true lesson is the struggle that takes place between the dream and reality. That struggle is a thing called life.” The end result of David’s life was the throne, however he head not even been anointed king when he killed the lion and the bear. It was in this early encounter that David developed the character to defeat the giant of his adolescence. Proverbs 20:11 reminds us that “Even a child is know by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right.” We cannot afford to run interference for children, or intervene in such a way as to take situations out of their hands, that would give them the opportunity to mature.

A friend of mine once told me, “your children don’t need healing, you do.” We do damage when we foist on our kids the ooze and infection from our own unhealed wounds. Daily we are bombarded by the media with examples of this phenomenon in children’s sports and school activities. Parents who have not effectively dealt with their own gaping wounds intrude unnecessarily in the lives of their children, sometimes to tragic proportions. Sadly, Christians are not exempt from this behavior. Jesus said, “Behold the hour cometh, yea is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.” (John 16:32) Applied here, there are times in a youngster’s life that the parent needs to back off and let God and life do a little teaching. We are to model the nature of God to our kids; we are not to be God.

That warm summer day in Waco, Texas, I heard the snarl of the lion as it crept closer and I saw the shadow of the bear as it loomed above my little one in our driveway. Their names were loneliness and disappointment. Other strangers have visited in his life from time to time, but I try to remember that he is not alone because the Father is with him. I have watched him struggle and win and occasionally I have watched his struggles end in defeat, but I have marveled at the dogged determination with which he gets up and goes again to live a live that I have given him for a God who will never leave him.

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