Mothering: Hold On, Let Go

When life hits a big bend in the road, it definitely illuminates the things you most prize.

Security.
Comfort.
Predictability.
Productivity.

Receiving the gift of a child comes as a package deal: priceless soft skin, sweet milk dribbling from the corner of a little mouth, painful wake-up calls every 3 hours (or sooner), soft cooing, diaper rash, spit-up, teeny-tiny newborn sleepers, inexplicable bloody screaming, and general upheaval from whatever used to be normal.

Having a couple of those packages now, I see something of what 1 Timothy 2:15 was talking about: But women will be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint.

Of course, no woman is saved by having a baby... all that pain and blood and exhaustion is not redemptive in itself.  But to continue in faith and love and sanctity, with self-restraint... to walk the hard (and very sweet... but very hard) road of coughs and food allergies and mastitis and temper tantrums and potty training and sometimes unrelenting 24-hour duty of caring for small people who are vulnerable, immature, and needy... it presses one down to the very bottom of self-sufficiency and into trust in the One who is bigger. 

Every family has its stories of blood, sweat, and gore, when absolutely everything was more than they could handle (stomach flu, finals, colic, joblessness, bankruptcy, insomnia, allergies... often all piled together).  Families are, perhaps, destined to wear the brokenness of this world like war wounds; almost killed us, survived by a hair, stronger now.

And even when the times are good, parenting is full of heartache. 

Just look at how big the kids are getting.  Feel the good-bye on the horizon (in 18 years or sometime sooner), when your season of care is over and God draws them onward to their own independent adventure in life.  Your heart gets all braided together with the fibers of these small people, and in the end, God doesn't intend for them to stay with you.  Perhaps a bit like Mary the mother of Jesus, every parent may feel the sword pierce your own heart whenever it strikes them... but you can't take it for them.

It calls for a particular kind of courage, the kind of gentle and quiet heart that will receive with an open hand all the good, the bad, and the ugly that God deems wise to send... and relinquish with an open hand when the season turns and something priceless has to be let go.

And in the process, I think God burns out a lot of selfishness and self-confidence and leaves us a bit more ready to call heaven home.