The Responsibility of Having Children

Medhelp

We recently experienced the arrival of our third daughter and the process from conception to the actual birthing event is quite strenuous. The experience has had me thinking more and more about the new life God has entrusted to our care and the value of all life. Having children is not for everyone, but for those who have them and wish to raise them well, it is both a calling and a responsibility.

You may have heard the saying, "children are a gift from the Lord;" if you have children, you may even feel like that statement is true whenever the kids are properly behaving themselves. In reality, children are much more than a gift...they are a miracle.

New life is created and with it come the responsibilities of raising a person to be a fully-functioning member of society. If you are a Christian, you have the additional responsibility of doing what you can to teach the child to love God and others as oneself.

Christians see value in human life because God is the author of life and all God created was good. However, because we now live in a world tainted with sin, our understanding of the value of life has been broken. We no longer see life for what it is--an opportunity to share in God's blessings. Instead, we toil through pain and strife to find peace and goodness.

Christians have a responsibility of sharing the Kingdom of God with the world. In order to share God's Kingdom, they must first understand God's Kingdom. It is a kingdom of peace, light, joy, beauty, truth, and honor. It is a kingdom of where right is distinguished from wrong, where good is distinguished from evil. It is a place where God is glorified in his righteousness and where people share in his rich blessings.

Parents must be willing to go through the process of raising their children to see beauty in ugliness, goodness in tragedy, joy in sorrow, and equipping them to chase their dreams, face their fears, and to strive for their goals. We must protect them from evil but we must allow them to make their own choices. We must also allow them to realize or face the consequences of their decisions. We must teach them to be at peace with all people, but to stand up for themselves and their beliefs when others want to challenge them. We must help our children experience new things like riding a bike, swimming, and tasting snow, but we must also let them see that pain accompanies pleasures when knees are scraped or when they eat the snow too quickly and get a cold headache.

The things parents do for their children, the sacrifices they make, the experiences they share, the conversations they have, they all point to seeing value in life. Every little thing we do has consequence and the way we handle each situation directs the paths of our lives and relationships. We all desire to be significant and because life is from God, all of life is significant. Everything matters: how we talk, how we act, how we think, how we feel, and what we eat.

It is difficult to see the intrinsic value in every person we meet, or at least to consciously keep ourselves aware of it. We must remember that all people are a miracle, that all are here because God chose to share his creation with them, whether they recognize him or not. Children remind us that life comes from the Lord, that he sustains us, and that each new day is a gift. How do you see others? How do you see your children?

Below are two of my favorite songs about being a parent and preparing to raise children. I posted the videos with the lyrics. Listen and enjoy.

Plumb: In My Arms

Creed: With Arms Wide Open

Individual Rights vs. The Public Good - How do you Draw the Line?

With all the news and political commentary I keep up with, I see one dichotomy which comes up often, and seems to summarize the ideological rift between Republicans and Democrats: "Individual Rights" vs. "The Public Good."


In one corner, you have the Republicans, who champion individual rights. For example, one reason Republicans oppose the Affordable Care Act is because it takes away individuals' rights to choose their own health care, and essentially takes away individuals' money and distributes it to the public.





In the other corner, you have the Democrats, who fight for the public good. Keeping with the health-care example, Democrats support the Affordable Care Act, precisely because it is for the good of the broader public, even if it does take away some individual rights.


Of course, this isn't a comprehensive description, free of exceptions. Republicans like to talk about the public good when defending foreign wars (it's for protecting the public), and Democrats like to espouse individual rights in their support for abortion (the woman's right, that is). Both support an individual's right to free speech, and both support taxes for building roads for the public good. But for the most part, I think this dichotomy sums it up.

So, here's my question to all of  you: How do you draw the line between the two? Or, when faced with the choice of one or the other on a particular issue, how do you choose between supporting individual rights, or supporting the public good?  And if you're coming at it from a Christian perspective, how does this influence your thinking?

I continue to wrestle with the Bible, church history, and the role of the church in society, and I have come to this simple conclusion: it's complicated.  Policy is complicated.  History is complicated.  Matching religious belief with your take on either of these is even more complicated.  It's way too complicated for one party to have the holistic, right answer.  The one thing I'm sure of is that Jesus has called us to do all of these things in love for our neighbors, even if it's not politically expedient.

A Call For Justice?

To you who are ready for the truth, I say this: Love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer for that person. If someone slaps you in the face, stand there and take it. If someone grabs your shirt, giftwrap your best coat and make a present of it. If someone takes unfair advantage of you, use the occasion to practice the servant life. No more tit-for-tat stuff. Live generously.

Here is a simple rule of thumb for behavior: Ask yourself what you want people to do for you; then grab the initiative and do it for them! If you only love the lovable, do you expect a pat on the back? Run-of-the-mill sinners do that. If you only help those who help you, do you expect a medal? Garden-variety sinners do that. If you only give for what you hope to get out of it, do you think that’s charity? The stingiest of pawnbrokers does that.

I tell you, love your enemies. Help and give without expecting a return. You’ll never—I promise—regret it. Live out this God-created identity the way our Father lives toward us, generously and graciously, even when we’re at our worst. Our Father is kind; you be kind.

Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults—unless, of course, you want the same treatment. Don’t condemn those who are down; that hardness can boomerang. Be easy on people; you’ll find life a lot easier. Give away your life; you’ll find life given back, but not merely given back—given back with bonus and blessing. Giving, not getting, is the way. Generosity begets generosity.

Love vs. Justice?

The above is a Jesus quote.  It's in Luke.  Even though I've heard these words numerous times, I read through this the other day thinking, "This isn't how I remember this quote."  It sounds Jesus-y, so I guess it didn't just now jump into my Bible.  

While taking time to ponder the passage I, of course, checked Facebook. I viewed many of my friends, many of them Christians, calling for action. Someone is giving them a hard time.  Someone slapped them in the face with their new policies, thoughts or opinions. They are offended.  Someone needs to do something!

There's a time and a place for justice.  There's a time and place to love our enemies.  Which is now?

For the full passage/context go here: Luke 6

Verses quoted are Luke 26-38. Scripture taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. 

Roses are red. Violets are blue. Facebook has thrown up. I think I might too.

I should say upfront, I'm not typically a Valentine's Day hater. More power to the anti-Vday folks who get together every February 14 to... I don't know what exactly, but that's just not my thing.

However.

Facebook is a bit of a pressure cooker---things get intensified because everyone is posting about the same thing nonstop. When this happens, whether it be because of the latest Evangelical controversy or some political scandal, the World Wide Web gets a little claustrophobic for me, and I have to leave.

Sadly, this is how I feel about Facebook on Valentine's Day.

Again, I'm not a romance hater. I'm a fan of love. I especially enjoy reading about my friends' happiness in love, even when I'm flying solo, which I admit might be a bit unusual, but I feel particularly strongly about the importance of public, or at least communal, expressions of love and affection and appreciation for your awesome SO. Society needs good love stories; we need examples of healthy relationships and how to navigate them in both public and private (communal and personal) spaces.

Most of the time---because I have super great friends who are some of the best people on the planet---I get a healthy dose of My-Husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/fiance-Is-The-Best! posts. These sorts of posts pop up on anniversaries and birthdays and completely out of the blue because, again, I have stellar friends who have equally stellar SOs.

This is a good thing. But it's also nice and spread out. On Valentine's Day, it's like it's everyone's anniversary on the same day. My feed is flooded with Vday posts, even from the pages I follow, so that everyone from that girl I knew in high school to NPR is posting about romance. All. Day. Sometimes all weekend.

In addition to just being obnoxious (to a good number of the attached as well as the unattached) because it's ubiquitous, Valentine's Day is already a day in which people can feel especially lonely, where the loneliness they already feel from time to time is magnified and intensified. Now add social media to the mix and that intensity is compounded even further.

So, I'm going to make a request that I normally wouldn't make. Please think twice before gushing to the World Wide Web about the sweet, romantic things your super-rad SO did for you on Valentine's Day. Maybe save it for birthdays and anniversaries and miscellaneous moments of love.

And don't forget your single friends. Let them know you love them too. Send a card or a text or an Amazon gift card. And maybe not just on Valentine's Day and birthdays, but just because.

Lessons Learned from my real-life tale of kissing dating goodbye

Because Valentine's Day approaches, I'm writing today about my real-life experience of Kissing Dating Goodbye. In the late nineties, Joshua Harris wrote a popular, sometimes controversial book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The basic premise was this: dating sets you up for marriage failure because it essentially teaches you to be a serial monogamist. Christians who are serious about marrying only one person for life shouldn't date until they're ready for marriage -- and it shouldn't look like modern dating; it should look like traditional courtship, where marriage is the goal of the relationship from the start, and physical involvement (if there is any) should be taken seriously and entered into extremely gradually. Sex, of course, was saved for marriage, but some members of the courtship movement would save kissing for the altar; some even saved holding hands. Together with the True Love Waits  movement, I Kissed Dating Goodbye was all part of the sexual purity message that any youth-group kid of the nineties will be familiar with.

The "I kissed dating goodbye," movement seems strange to both Christians and non-Christians, and it seemed strange to me, too, when I first heard about the book as a sophomore in High School. While I was a dedicated Christian and quite indoctrinated by the "True Love Waits" movement, I thought that giving up dating was dumb and looked suspiciously like a form of legalism. Then I read the book, and much to my surprise, the book was, as Joshua Harris puts it on his website today, more about "living your life for God" than about dating. I felt that familiar, gut-twisting feeling that Christians call "conviction," and I knew that dating, at this point in my life, was not something I needed to do. I wasn't ready for marriage yet, and being in relationships was distracting me from God. So, at 16 years old, I kissed dating goodbye. And it was probably the most important decision of my life. Here's why:

1. While I still had crushes on guys and wished I could date them, my life wasn't all about boys. I focused on academics, on youth group, and on the extracurricular activities I loved, such as drama and choir. I read classic literature, I wrote and recorded my first album in a home studio with my dad, and began to perform music across the city. If I had been dating, I probably would have been hanging out with a guy instead of developing myself as a person and an artist. And guess what? If you are well-developed person, you'll actually have something to talk about when you do start dating.

2. I learned to be friends with guys. This has proven to be a great life skill. It's important to know how to relate to the opposite sex without being distracted by sex. I learned that I really enjoyed hanging out with and having conversations with guys, and this became even more important when I got to college.

3. I didn't let a guy determine my college choice, and I didn't have to go to college with the baggage of a High School Boyfriend.

4. I avoided a lot of heartbreak. Sure, there was still some heartbreak, especially of feeling that I wanted to date people, but knowing that it wasn't the right time, and I'm sure I sent some mixed signals to guy friends I was interested in but felt I "couldn't" date. But because I didn't date, I avoided the deeper emotional attachments that somehow entwine themselves with physical attachments; moreover, it's a lot easier to practice sexual abstinence when you're not dating someone.

5. I was friends with my now husband, who I met in college, for over a year before I knew he was interested in me romantically. Since I wasn't interested at the time, we remained friends for a total of 5 years before we ever dated. Now I admire his persistence and patience, and he probably didn't appreciate being "just friends" at the time, but I have to say, being good friends with my husband before becoming romantically involved was probably the best gift our marriage could have been given. Because we were friends first, we learned that we were intellectually compatible, that we could have great conversations, that I could watch Star Wars with him and that we knew the same Simon and Garfunkel songs, all without the haze of post-makeout-oxytocin clouding our brains. Because we were friends, we learned to laugh together and to appreciate each other even without the best clothes and flawless hairstyles that we would have worn on dates. We learned to see each other as complete humans, not just members of the opposite sex who could fulfill our romantic fantasies. When we finally dated, our brains and bodies were concerned with very different things than getting to know one another as friends, and the choice to get married was easier, knowing that decision was based on more than the primary urge of two twenty-something virgins.

Don't get me wrong; there were downsides to not dating; it was lonely at times, and as I got older, it became harder to be friends with guys, as I often viewed them, Jane Austen style, as potential husbands before I even got to know them. Also, not-dating can set up marriage as some sort of Holy Grail that will solve all problems -- and viewing marriage in this way can imperil the marriage. I was never as strict with the non-dating as Joshua Harris; I simply delayed dating until marriage was a viable option, not until I was sure I would marry whoever I was dating, so my experiment with "courtship culture" was not quite as dramatic as some in the movement. But looking back, I now believe that kissing dating goodbye set my marriage up for success. 

The Theological Importance of Imagination

Imagination is essential to Christianity.

Now, I realize most of us have had it drilled into our hearts and minds that imagination equals irresponsibility:

“Don’t tell me stories! I want the truth.”

“Stop daydreaming your life away.”

“Don’t be naive. This is life, not a fairy tale.”

Imagining is for children, so the story goes, and perhaps it is exactly the child-like quality of imagining that makes the practice essential to Christianity. Of course many of you are familiar with when Jesus said, "Truly I say to you, unless you repent (change, turn about) and become like little children [trusting, lowly, loving, forgiving], you can never enter the kingdom of heaven [at all]" (Matt 18:3 Amplified).

I submit to you that imagination is vital to the Christian disciplines of being trusting, lowly, loving, and forgiving. In JK Rowling's 2008 Harvard Commencement speech, the writer of the imaginatively (and christianly) rich Harry Potter series asserts,

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
[…]

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

Imagination is not inherently evil in adults; it can be used virtuously or viciously. Used virtuously, imagination is the engine of human empathy, which is a sort of love-induced, love-inspired understanding of another human being. Love-infused understanding is the kind of knowledge we are called to embody as believers. Consider the words of the apostle Paul in yet another familiar passage:

If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge... but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. (1 Cor 13:2 New Living, emphasis mine)

In other words, we cannot know another person without love---not really, not in any way that's constructive or virtuous... or in any way that really counts for anything. That passage goes on to assert just exactly what Christian love looks like:

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. (4-7)

If we are going to “never give up” on another person, we have to see in them something more than the flesh and blood standing before us. We have to see their potential beyond their failings. We have to see their image-of-God-bearing good will in the face of their hurtful words and actions. We have to see what is unseen. In other words, we have to see with eyes of faith.

We cannot, however, see through eyes of faith if we lack the "capacity to envision that which is not;" we cannot see truly if we lack imagination. Caroline J Simon, in her excellent book, The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny, and Imagination, puts it this way:

Perhaps, then, love can be a source of insight. In fact, I think that genuine love, in all its forms [neighbor love, romantic love…], provides insight into the loved one’s true self [the untainted Image-bearing self God created and Christ redeemed us to be]. In order for this to occur, however, our hearts must be trained and disciplined… The undisciplined heart is prone to whimsical reaction and wishful, self-interested projection; it confuses love with love’s counterfeits: infatuation, manipulation, and sentimentality. (12-13)

Simon goes on to distinguish between virtuous imagining as “the capacity to see what may not yet appear but should" (emphasis mine)---should as in, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven” --- and vicious imagining which demands my kingdom come, my will be done.

So what does virtuous and vicious imagining look like? Vicious imagining happens when a white woman sees a black man and clutches her purse. It happens when a young man creates a false notion of the young woman in the next cubical and reacts in bitterness when she does not act like her Invented Self would. It happens anytime anyone puts another person on a pedestal. And when we're content to see people by labels instead of names.

Virtuous imagining happens when a teacher believes there's more beneath the surface of the trouble-maker sitting in the fourth row; when he values her and therefore expects more of her than anyone ever has before. Virtuous imagining happens when a teacher or parent or friend believes in, encourages, and nurtures their student/child/friend's work and abilities. Virtuous imagining happens when friends and lovers bring out the best in us, when they encourage and nurture the beautiful parts of us we are scared to show or didn't even know were there. It happens when we see what the Good Samaritan saw: he saw a human being when others saw an inconvenience and a social faux pas. A virtuous imagination sees beyond the foibles of the church and sees Christ in the church. 

I could go on and on, but here's the point: if we want to be a song to the world and to one another, rather than unmitigated noise (see 1 Cor 13:1), we must learn to channel knowledge through love; we must learn to connect to one another's humanness, to empathize. And in order to empathize, we must relearn how to imagine.