Do you sometimes have thoughts pass through your mind that start with, “If I was a completely different person…” or “If I had a different life…”? I’m a daydreamer, and I see the possibilities in everything. So, these thoughts come often for me.
In one case, I was at an outdoor concert watching some friends play in a band in an emptied out barn. I sat on a three-person van seat that had been placed on the ground. Next to me was my friend Ryan. Our friend’s niece, a four-year-old girl with bright blonde hair, was playing with us as we all danced to the music. Ryan kept grinning over at me, and we kept locking eyes, and for just a moment I thought, “Man, I would love to have kids with him.”
I didn’t think on it much more after that since I was in a relationship at the time. But now, more than five years later, Ryan and I have a seven-month-old daughter. We fell in love and we knew from the beginning that we eventually wanted to have kids (or at least one). We waited until we got married, and a year and a half later, we brought a baby into the world.
One of the reflection questions at the end of this chapter in Devotions for Sacred Parenting, Bring Me the Boy, is Have you ever asked yourself the question, ‘Why did we have children?’ What do you think your primary motivation to have children was?
For me, it was a blend of reasons. Once I started to get to know Ryan in a deeper way, I wanted us to be parents together and love on a new, little person. But I also loved babies and I wanted to take care of one. I wanted to home school some day. I thought watching kids grow up and showing them the world would be fun. When I started to get older, I thought, if I don’t have kids, what will I even do with myself? It sounded like the best way to pass the next few decades.
Some of these reasons are deep and based in love. Others are more shallow and self-centered. This devotion encourages us to be intentional with our parenting and our goals as parents. No matter what our reasons were in the beginning, we can have the right motivation today. Are we raising our kids to be happy or successful? Are we raising them for narcissistic reasons? Or are we raising them to be servants of God? As Gary Thomas writes, “What is the grand scheme behind your family?”
It’s important we ask ourselves this question each day, as we teach them lessons, as we model good behavior, as we make decisions regarding their education, as we talk with them. We’re tasked with raising children who will follow God. (If God seem like too nebulous a term for you, or too bogged down with baggage, you can use Love instead.) Instead of guiding our children with the values of a capitalistic society who emphasizes the individual above all else, we can choose love, peace, faith, joy, and other values important in the kingdom of God.
When asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God will not come with observable signs. Nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘There it is.’ For you see, the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
Luke 17:20-21, NIV
The kingdom of God is in our midst. We are building the kingdom now. The human race is clearly in a time of transition as we deal with the consequences of colonization, the connectivity of globalization and the Internet, and the threat of climate change. We are parenting the next generation who will be the stewards of this earth and citizens of the kingdom of God.
The basis of our little three-person family is love. Ryan and I loved each other so much we wanted to multiply that love and shower it on a baby. We hope she can take that love into our community, into her relationships, into all the places she goes. Hopefully our love will spread out into all the corners of her world and ours, guiding us all.