In the 1982 psychological drama Sophie’s Choice, for which Meryl Streep won a Best Actress Oscar, Streep plays a Polish immigrant in post-war New York City. We learn later in the movie that she has a dark secret: during the war, she was imprisoned in Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp where she lost her husband and father. While there, she is forced by her captors to make a terrible choice: she must choose which of her children, a son or daughter, will go to the gas chamber. If she refuses, they will take them both. The movie explores the psychological aftermath of such a terrifying decision.
I was thinking about this movie and the haunting effect our children have on us. We were still basking in the afterglow of my older daughter’s wonderful wedding when my wife called me while I was out of town for work last week. She was discouraged because one of our other children was upset with her over a perceived slight or inequity in treatment she felt she received relative to her sisters. My sweet wife, who had spent months planning and showering affection (and, if you’ve ever held a wedding, not an insignificant financial investment) on our children, felt justifiably defeated. I did my best to encourage her, but I understood. While my wife certainly never had to make the same Hobson’s choice as Sophie, the feeling of “can’t win for losing” as a parent is one with which we’re all familiar.
The Lord instructs us to love our neighbors; love and honor our parents; love one another within the church; love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us; and even love our spouses as Christ loved the church. Yet, He never tells us to love our kids. Because He doesn’t have to. I remember the day my oldest was born, my firstborn. Holding that beautiful, still kind of blue, hair on her ears, new life in my hands, I was stunned that I could possibly love someone so much I had just met. The others hit me just as hard.
We stand over their crib to make sure they’re still breathing. We cheer like it’s the Super Bowl when they take their first steps. We try, in vain, to catch their vomit in public, a feat we would attempt with no other human being. We feel like we’re always showering goodness on them, and they respond by questioning whether we care about them or at least as much as we do their siblings. We always want the best for them, and we’re willing to sacrifice our own comfort and well-being, anytime and anywhere, to make that happen. And yet, not only do they not appreciate that sacrifice most of the time, the reality is they will never love us as much or in the same way we love them.
We are their dumping grounds, where they drop their load of despondency, anxiety, fears, and depression. They often only share the bad, then forget to tell us when things improve, leaving us still in a state of sadness for them, long after they’ve moved on. They speak to us with a rawness reserved only for us, words and a tone they would never share with their friends or anyone else that can cut us to the bone.
When they are walking a righteous path, making good decisions, our hearts soar. We truly have “no greater joy.” And when they stray, it’s devastating. The saying “you’re only as happy as your least happy child” weighs heavily upon us because it’s true.
The bottom line is, as exasperating as our children can sometimes be, we love them unconditionally. We do so because God gives them to us so that we will love them the way He loves us, and they treat us, in many different ways, the way we treat Him.
We can get frustrated or embittered about how our children treat us, eventually becoming those old people who complain that their kids don’t appreciate them or don’t come to see them enough. Or we can use it as an opportunity to be grateful that we are loved like that by God, so wholly, completely, and well. And we can surrender to God’s hand in teaching us how to love better and more fully, in less selfish ways, expecting less in return.
We can respond by not doubting God’s love. I sometimes think that God is mildly, or maybe more than mildly, displeased with me, often thinking I could do a little bit better or could clean up my act a little more, kind of a cosmic scorekeeper. But that’s not really the heart of a good parent, is it? That’s the guy yelling at his kid at the Little League park that makes everyone uncomfortable. That’s not the heart of God. I think God’s more like we were the day our littles first learned to walk. We didn’t stand there, arms crossed, looking down our noses and saying, “Big deal. Let me know when you can run the mile in seven minutes or less.” We yelled, said, “Honey, grab the camera!” and took photo after photo, sending them to everyone we knew. We were the dad who was crazy about his kid, his greatest cheerleader. That’s the heart of God, every time we get something right. We just need to receive that love.
When our kids frustrate us (and, boy, do they ever at times!), it’s a great opportunity to press into them and be reminded about the persevering, longsuffering, unyielding love of God and be grateful for it. When I think about all the ways God loves me that way, it makes it much easier to be those things for my kids (or anyone else, for that matter). My kids teach me to love well, and learning to love well is never easy.
Finally, when I’m older, and the time comes for me to be a “burden” on my kids, I’m not going to feel guilty about that. I was reading a book by Jen Wilkins on aging called Dust to Dust. Wilkins notes that, too often in our culture, we have unrealistic expectations on aging, seeing it as unnatural or unhealthy for our children to care for us. We don’t want to be a burden on them. I’m not suggesting that we don’t make smart decisions to help them financially and otherwise with that process; we should. But, in the same way that loving them when they’re hard to love teaches us to love, caring for us when we’re older is God’s way of teaching them the same things. It’s an honor and a privilege for Ashley and me to care for our parents, and I’m not going to deny my children that same sanctification.
I think about the decision Sophie had to make and the weight of being forced to make the most terrible decision a parent could make. God faces that decision every day. It’s not exactly the same because we’re the ones who choose: one chooses life, one chooses death. We make the decision to reject Jesus and condemn ourselves to death, but it does give us insight into the impact on God’s heart to see his children make that eternal decision every day. God loves in a way we’ll never have the capacity to love, being the very nature and character of love. But the joy and pain of loving people who are hard to love, even when they live with us, make us more like Him every day.
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