We Never Stop Being Children

[HKHaugan]

We Never Stop Being Children

It’s wonderful to watch infants start to get a hold of life. Infants are helpless and totally dependent individuals learning to be persons and constantly reaching out for physical and emotional sustenance. To see them from birth is capturing an ongoing miracle. While their learning process is slow every second contains an opportunity for the shaping of their minds and hearts. As they grow, learning is more rapid and the need to guide them becomes increasingly complicated due to their awareness that there is another world outside of their parents.

This world is only partially made up of what they see. It is really more about what they can’t see. The stories we tell them in their baby years have messages that convey unseen ideas, principles and morals. The life we live in front of them gives them hints that there is a good and a bad, a right way and a wrong way. Children are constantly taking notes, observing our reactions and responses. They are sponges soaking up and processing as they go, not missing a thing on the way.

Now all of us know that growing up is not easy. We all know the foundation for that growth is based on parental love, patience, prayer and ongoing support. The old expression that fits parental nurture rings only half true, “The task of a parent is to cease to be apparent.”

However, there is a much deeper other half. The real challenge for parents is the context of the process they choose for child rearing. While parenting may be natural to the degree you have affection and provide for a child’s physical needs it is the unseen dimension of their spiritual heart needs that many times is overlooked. A child desperately needs to know its spiritual context, the ‘how’ to be a person. That’s the deeper half. What they pick up from parents in terms of their spiritual life sets the tone for what they choose to bring balance to the reasoning they develop when it comes to making simple everyday choices involving right and wrong. This is where parents need parenting.

The most important thing a parent can realize is that you can’t be parents alone.

First, parents need to recognize they are children, images of their true parent, God. “You are the children of the LORD your God…(Deut.14:1).” Parents need to realize their limitations when it comes to their own choices and decisions and how they relate to the world around them. It means recognizing their imperfections as well as their good intentions. They need to admit their need for ongoing help in their own lives. If a mother and father can leave their pride and go the One who loves them they will in turn seek each others' welfare first. It’s the child who benefits from this atmosphere.

“Jesus called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me (Matt.18:2-5).”

Second, a child is an image of God, therefore more than just ‘my’ baby. A child is a gift, a blessing from God to be raised as an image of God. This does not mean being or getting the child to be ‘religious.’ It does mean letting them in on what you really are as a person in relationship to the One you let guide your life. They feel what you feel, take in their minds what you take in and react the way they see you react. If you are their only parent then they will do what you do. But if God is your parent then they will do as He does. “Train a child in the way he should go. When he is old, he will not turn away from it (Prov.22:6).”

Third, a child is a relational being and how a parent relates to others is how the child gets its spiritual relational bearings. “God sets the lonely in families…(Ps.68:6)” Parents need other parents who know their limitations and share with them on a regular basis. When a child is raised in an atmosphere of relational believing people this will be the foundational security for later life. Parents need a larger family of people who believe in God so they can learn how to be children who are responsible for raising the children they have been blessed with.

The real problem with an adult not facing the need to be a child before God is pride, guilt, anger and their conjoined shadow, fear. They are inseparable. Children will only find these quadruplets in their future unless the parents become children before God.