Over Christmas break, we had the opportunity to go to Santa Fe with my oldest, Emma, and her former boyfriend, Sam. I say “former boyfriend” because he arrived in Santa Fe as her boyfriend and returned as her fiancé. They were engaged in the famous Loretto Chapel. It was an exciting time in our family’s life.
On our way back from Santa Fe, I was recalling a trip we took out there in the distant past. Santa Fe has long been a favorite destination for us, and I remember taking Emma out there when she was a toddler. We had returned to Dallas and landed; we were seated in the back row by the restroom. We were waiting for everyone else to get off, and it was hot. Emma was standing up on the seat between us, and as we watched her, we could see that she had that look in her eye. If you have ever been a parent of a toddler, you know that “overheated” look. She was about to vomit, like little kids do.
As she vomited, both Ashley and I rushed to stick our hands under her mouth to catch the projectile. If you’ve ever tried to catch someone’s vomit in your hands, you understand the futility of it. All you accomplish is making a mess for everyone involved. However, I recall as I was positioning my hands beneath her mouth, nearly in slow motion, contemplating, “Huh. Everyone else on earth, including my wife, who is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, would cause me to get as far away as I could from their vomit; only for this person would my immediate instinct be to place my hands underneath it in a vain attempt to catch it.”
There’s nothing we wouldn’t do for our children, is there? I was thinking about this over the holidays and reflecting on how this child has now become a full adult who is about to become a wife and, perhaps someday, a mother, yet I still have the same feelings for her. I probably wouldn’t catch her vomit anymore, but I would do almost anything else for her.
God’s Word tells us to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, and minds, and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Luke 10). He tells us to love and honor our mother and father in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. God tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us so that we may be sons and daughters of heaven, in Matthew 5. He even commands us to love our spouses in Ephesians 5.
Yet, nowhere in Scripture are we commanded to love our children. We’re commanded to instruct them in the Lord in Deuteronomy 6, not hinder them from coming to the Lord in Matthew 19, and to discipline them in Proverbs 13, but nowhere are we commanded to love them. In passages like Matthew 7 and Luke 11 (“you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children”), Jesus just assumes we will. I think there’s a good reason why we’re never commanded to love our kids, and that’s because they are the only people on earth that we don’t need to be told to love. We love them instinctively, naturally. God gives us a bond with them that’s instantaneous and that doesn’t exist with anyone else.
I remember the day each one of my now-adult children was born. I remember observing their small, misshapen, somewhat bluish bodies, which were not particularly appealing at that moment, with a sense of wonder (one of them even had hair on her ears that was somewhat intimidating at the time but fell off a few days later), contemplating, “How is it possible to love someone so deeply whom I have just met?”
This love is truly God-given. Scientists will tell you it’s a natural response, imprinted by nature, as a defense mechanism to help preserve the child’s life. But why does it exist? How did this response come to be? What biological advantage does this response provide, especially considering that it often involved great sacrifice and potential harm to the mother and parents, perhaps more so in the past than in the present? No, nature didn’t put it in there; God put it in there, and He put it there for a reason: so we would have some indication of how much He loves us.
God wants us to understand how much He loves us. God’s love for us is part of His very character. God’s love for us is not primarily rooted in emotion but in identity. It’s who He is—His very being. He can’t not love, and He won’t love you less than He does. Which means that His love is not dependent upon our behavior, or whether we’re obedient or not. This is comparable to how we feel about our children, who can occasionally be quite the little stinkers. And, your children will never love you as much as you love them. It won’t happen, even if you want it to. Your love for them will always be sacrificial, because that’s how God designed it. Because that’s how God loves you.
Therefore, if you think of a God who looks at you with disgust, disappointment, frustration, or anger, that’s a wrong view of God’s love for you. But, depending on our past and the eyes of our brokenness, we sometimes view God that way. When we see God as a parent who interacts with you primarily out of these postures, your primary response to God will be to try to earn his approval. When you strive to gain someone’s approval, you constantly manage your image, maintain your best behavior, and worry about the other person’s perception of you and your own performance. You are completely performance-driven.
When you’re in that position, you can’t relax. And, if you can’t relax, you can’t surrender. It’s impossible to surrender to someone who is always evaluating your every step to determine whether they approve of you. Wouldn’t it be terrible for your children to think of you this way? Wouldn’t you hate for them to think, “I need to constantly be in a position of earning Mom’s approval, or Dad’s approval, of earning their love”? If you have children who are highly driven by performance, they often require you to express love through statements like, “I love you because you’re my child, because you’re my beloved, not because of what you do or how you perform. I will never love you more than I do at this very moment, regardless of your actions or inactions. You want your kids to relax, to rest in your love, and to trust in it, don’t you? You don’t want them on a counselor’s couch someday, or struggling like I did, driving to achieve to earn your approval when they already had it to begin with, do you?
Then, why are our interactions with God so often performance-driven? What motivates us to continually seek his approval?
It’s simple to understand the Fatherheart of God when we contemplate giving our kids love. The idea that God loves his children is easy to understand when we think about how much we love our kids and what we’d do for them.
If we can’t understand and receive God’s love for us, we wonn’t relax. And, if we can’t relax, we can’t surrender. And, if we can’t surrender, we’ll be fighting the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. We won’t be working with Him, but against Him. He may still perform some transformative work in us, but it will only occur after He wrestles with us like Jacob did, which may involve dislocating our hip or causing us significant pain because we are resisting Him. And He won’t make nearly the progress, benefit, value, and transformation He would make in us if we would surrender and accept His love.
It is absolutely possible to personally know God’s love, rather than just knowing about it, and to have His love as the core of your identity, defining what you understand most about yourself. And this reality, this identity, is at the heart of any significant spiritual growth. Before you can love others the way God calls you to, your heart has to be transformed. The way God tells you to love all those other people except your children? – That’s impossible with a natural, sin-bound human heart. You can’t love the way He commands you to love out of your flesh. That love is supernatural, and it can only be given to you through a heart that’s transformed by the Holy Spirit. And your heart is transformed by accepting and realizing God’s love for you.
So, why is it so difficult to receive that love, through the lens of a child? I think there are a couple of reasons why it’s so much more challenging to receive this kind of love than it is to give it to our children. Both are rooted in pride, and I mean pride in the spiritual sense, meaning the unhealthy, sinful obsession with self.
First, we still struggle with the fact that to accept that love, we have to accept the grace that Jesus offers through his sacrifice on the cross. It’s through this grace that we’ve been restored in our relationship with God, restored to unconditional love. This means that we have to embrace the fact that we are completely lost and unable to do anything good on our own without him. Our sinful nature constantly resists this truth. We want our performance to drive our resume, to prove that we can do it, that we can be good enough. We want control. It’s in our nature, and it has to be driven out.
This was where I was predominantly. I was striving to gain the approval of my earthly father, who, as I discovered years later, genuinely loved and approved of me. In reality, I was seeking the approval of a ghost or a mythical version of my father that my young self had concocted in my mind, which I then projected onto God. For years, I couldn’t get out of the cycle of earning my dad’s and my God’s approval and driving to achieve. It was rooted in my attempts to control my environment, arising from a childhood that was, frankly, pretty chaotic and unstable.
The other reason we resist God’s unconditional love stems from our belief that we could never deserve it. We’re so full of shame and grief for who we were and the things we’ve done in our past that we can’t embrace the fact that God loves us with the grace of Jesus. We’d never admit that we’re effectively saying that Jesus’ blood on the cross wasn’t good enough to wash away our sin, but we functionally act as if it wasn’t—embracing the sin of our past, or accepting some other lie about ourselves, and refusing to accept the freedom Jesus has already offered us through grace, driven by love.
Both of these notions are rooted in fear: fear that I won’t measure up, that I won’t be accepted, that, despite what Scripture says, I won’t be healed. It’s terrifying to accept the notion that I have to surrender myself to be saved, to relinquish the illusion of control I have over my life, and yet that’s the only way to release us from our fear and to heal us.
God knows this, and that’s why he sent Jesus. The whole purpose of the Incarnation, which we just finished celebrating, is God’s perfect love casting out fear. God’s first words when Christ came were “Fear Not”—this was an invitation to actually know God. Jesus, who is and was all God, came to reveal the Father to us—to know what He is like and how much He loves us—so that we wouldn’t be afraid to surrender to Him, to relinquish control, in order for Him to transform us.
Knowing God’s love is deeper than belief. It comes from experience. Theology is good and critical; you have to have a strong foundational theology to know God and His plans and purposes, but knowing God’s love for you comes in addition to good theology. For years, I didn’t understand that. I thought that if I just studied God’s Word enough and read Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology enough times, I could become a person who loved God and loved others. That is, until I met a lot of really unloving people who knew a lot of theology.
In Surrender to Love, David Benner says that transformational knowing of God’s love “comes from sitting at the feet of Jesus, gazing into His face, and listening to His assurances of love for me from His Word. It comes from letting God’s love wash over me, not simply trying to believe it. It comes from soaking in the scriptural assurances of such love, not just reading them to remember, study, or believe. It comes from spending time with God, observing how he looks at me.” In short, it comes from practicing God’s presence, from abiding in Him.
That’s why Jesus in John 15 says, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you’ll bear much fruit.” This process of actively being aware of and in the presence of Jesus, of meditating on His word and His truth, and letting it soak over us, and of receiving God’s love for us, changes us to bear good fruit, to love others, and to serve them in the work to which He’s called us. Henri Nouwen said, “Once I have accepted the truth that I am God’s beloved child, unconditionally loved, I can be sent into the world to speak and act as Jesus did.
This semester, I want to encourage you to continue to abide in Him and practice His presence, allowing Him the freedom to transform you into all He has created and called you to be and to love others, even those who are difficult to love.
As I’ve grieved my father’s passing over this past month, I’ve found that I am truly grateful for him and his legacy in my life. I didn’t always feel that way. As I mentioned previously, I had a complex, tension-filled relationship with him for the first 16 years of my life, followed by a limited one for the next 10 years. By God’s grace, Jesus took control of my father’s life, matured me, and redeemed our relationship.
As my children have grown, God has given me additional, hard-won insight into my parents. Because, as we raised our kids, Ashley and I did all the things, determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past: we read all the books, watched all the videos, and prayed like crazy over our girls. And yet, y’all, I’m here to tell you: we still messed them up. By God’s grace, they love Jesus, but they all struggle with issues that may not have stemmed from what we said to them (we got most of those right); rather, their struggles arise from the behaviors we modeled while living out of our brokenness. As we know from being educators, it isn’t what we say, it’s what we unconsciously do, and the messages underlying it, that are at the root of the hardest things they deal with.
This insight has given me compassion for my parents, because they were just doing the best they could with us. They weren’t thinking, “Let’s see if we can mess these kids up.” They They were living out of the depths of their own brokenness and family tragedy, and their sin interacted with mine to create the struggles I’ve faced.
Understanding these things about my dad and my parents allowed me to release and forgive. It’s allowed me to appreciate him, to release the power that the past held on me, and yet still appreciate its formative power in, through God’s grace, all that He has made me to be. It also allowed me to give deep thanks for the gift of Jesus and for God’s grace that has redeemed my brokenness, forgiven me, and is strong in me where I am weak. He also provides courage and vision to see that He’s in the process of doing the same things with my children, so I can rest in that and not blame myself for it or live in shame but know that God’s grace covers my well-intentioned failures. And, He used this school and these people in their lives to make them women who love Jesus and who are in the process of being healed and transformed.
I’m sharing these stories to inspire you as you raise your kids (because, if you haven’t already figured it out, you’re going to mess up, too, but God is so very good). I also want to encourage you in the supernatural empathy, compassion, and love God gives you for others as you understand and accept his love for you. Every other parent and child you encounter daily has a unique story. Like yours, it’s a story of pain, neglect, wrongheadedness, sin, and brokenness. But even more importantly, it’s one of redemption through Jesus. And we all, as a community of faith, get to be a part of that story. And 99% of us are simply striving to love our children and act in their best interests. So, let’s love and not judge each other, or compare ourselves to each other, show each other the love of Jesus, and guide each other as God gives us opportunities in gentleness, compassion, and love.
Part of God’s grace in my life, in bringing me to this place, was not only God’s supernatural transformation, but the way he worked through my teachers, coaches, counselors, and mentors to write a very different story for me than the one that could have been written. This story is still being written; so far, it reflects themes of redemption, healing, forgiveness, and a legacy that differs from the one I was originally given. And, all of this is possible for our kids at Grace, through the Grace of God working through all of you as you walk with Him as He transforms you by His love and works through you to love, guide, and steward the lives of our kids and their families.
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