Moving On From Noodles

I had an epiphany last week.  I was feeding my kids what they ecstatically call “cheesy noodles”—a.k.a. good old macaroni and cheese from a box.  I ate a forkful from the pan and stopped.  I realized, with shock and horror and some satisfaction, that I no longer liked this food.  In fact, it doesn’t appeal to me much at all!

Then my mind went back to all those summers growing up when my mom required us to cook one meal per week as part of our regular chore list.  One of our favorite meals to prepare was box mac-n-cheese.  We liked to make it because it was both easy to prepare and because we loved—and I mean adored—eating it.  My mom would often be busy working with her gardening or sewing while we partook of these meals.  “Would you like me to save you some?” I would ask.  Gently her no would come back.  She once said she didn’t really like this food.  How can this be? I wondered.  In a Peter-Pan sense of losing one’s childhood, I vowed that I would never give up my love for macaroni and cheese.  I could not fathom life without it.  

So discovering last week that I have outgrown my childhood food love was in some ways a letdown.  It was a betrayal of my innocence and simplicity.  The feeling you get when you watch your toddler master some brand new skill or suddenly fit into a whole new shoe size.  There is pride in the accomplishment along with a twinge of sadness that growing up is inevitable.

But perhaps my greater astonishment in leaving behind mac-n-cheese was the sense of rightness that accompanied the departure.  I realized that what I have now discovered—grown-up food—is infinitely better than what satisfied me as a child.  Now I love to eat warm crusted goat cheese and roasted asparagus and made-from-scratch pierogies.  The culinary world beckons, and I am delighted to discover new and delectable edibles from around the world.   

The parallel here is to our spiritual “taste” in food.  A couple times in the New Testament (see I Corinthians 3 and Hebrews 5) there is a contrast between “milk” and “meat.”  The trouble seems to be that those requiring milk didn’t even know what they were missing!  They had stunted their spiritual palate.  C. S. Lewis uses the famous analogy of “an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”  The encouragement here is that even the things we love about God and His word can still be deepened as we grow in Christ.  Unlike my noodle analogy, we will not “dislike” what we loved as young Christians; rather, they will cease to satisfy us and we will crave more complex and deeper relationships with the God of the universe.  We will understand Him more fully (though never completely), and we will  . . . grow!   

And this progress in spiritual culinary understanding is good and right.  Let us not cling to our childish loves but embrace and seek to grow in Christ as we live each day.  It happens slowly and gradually until, one day, we look back and see that the progress has been being made and we are no longer the spiritual children we once were.  As Paul said, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (I Corinthians 13:11).

O taste and see that the Lord is good:

blessed is the man that trusteth in him.

O fear the Lord, ye his saints:

for there is no want to them that fear him.

The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger:

but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.
Psalm 34: 8-10

No Guarantees

I endure pregnancy.  In actual fact, I have some of the most routine, easiest pregnancies (and deliveries, so far!) that anyone could ask.  For me, though I surely dread the fatigue and other common symptoms of being pregnant, it’s not the pregnancy I hate.  It’s the waiting.  I want that baby in my arms—NOW!  The one consolation for all my pregnancy complaints is that, “Well, at least at the end you have a baby.”

Lately it seems God has been showing me just how presumptuous this idea is.  While it is true that the vast majority of pregnancies in modern USA do go to smooth completion, this week has brought story after story of just the opposite.  A friend of a friend whose baby died the day he was delivered.  Another friend who yesterday gave birth at 28 weeks and now waits anxiously while her baby’s life hangs in the balance.  There was a couple in our childbirth class who gave birth at 35 weeks only to lose their precious boy a few hours later. 

And history is replete with tragic stories of the death of babies and toddlers.  Infant mortality rates in the previous centuries are breathtakingly high.  Consider Charles and Sally Wesley: “Only three of the couple's children survived infancy: Charles Wesley junior (1757–1834), Sarah Wesley (1759–1828), who like her mother was also known as Sally, and Samuel Wesley (1766–1837). Their other children, John, Martha Maria, Susannah, Selina and John James are all buried in Bristol having died between 1753 and 1768.” 

When I spent a summer in Kenya we had a well-baby clinic on Friday afternoons.  The clinician would ask the mother how many children she had had and how many were currently living.  Almost without fail the mother would give two different answers.  Nearly every mother there had experienced the death of a child.

Another loss I’ve learned to grieve more deeply is for the mothers of the soldiers killed at war.  I used to think of soldiers as adults, whom their entire family would miss but mostly their wives.  Now I realize how young an 18- or 19-year-old boy is; and no matter how old her child, a mother loses so much—so much investment, so much promise, so much love—with the death of her babe.

All these sad thoughts to say that we are given no promises in this life.  As “sure” as a thing seems, it is still in the hands of an almighty, providential God.  A God who loves us, but who also rules our lives in His omniscience.  A God whose thoughts are not our thoughts, whose ways are not our ways.  Our ways are for ourselves.  For peace.  For black-and-white pictures of beautiful, perfect, sleeping infants.  God’s ways are perfect.  Sometimes that perfection looks perfect to us, too.  But not always.  I truly pray and hope for a healthy, beautiful, living infant in my arms.  Soon.   

When, and if, this happens I pray that I remember what a gracious gift He has given.  Not taken for granted.  But blessing upon blessing, received with a grateful heart.  And open hands.

"There's a Person in There!"

From this . . . :

 . . . to this:

When I collected my son from the nursery at the church we were visiting on Sunday, the nursery worker praised his obedience.  Knowing as I do, that a boy who has just turned two is no proven workmanship of parenting, it was still gratifying to hear that he had done well that morning.  Her explanation, that even with very young children you can tell what standards are being set in the home, made me think about the reputation a child has.  “Even a child is known by his doing.”  This is certainly true for elementary-aged children, but it seems to be true even at a much younger age range.  And I know this from the times I spent as a babysitter in high school.  Some families were fun to sit for; others required grit, determination, and a lot of cash.

A good friend and mentor from our church in Pennsylvania likes to tell the following story.  Her oldest child Timothy was having his first birthday party when someone remarked that in six months or so they would have to start spanking him.  A kind friend of hers told her sincerely that if they waited six months to start teaching him to obey, it would be six months too late.

My husband and I joke about the transformation that occurs to make a baby into a “real person.”  We mean, of course, the child becomes someone with cognition and the ability to act in his or her own will.  As the mother of very young children, I am amazed at how early that self-will begins to exert itself.  These expressions of “personhood” are both a joy and concern.  We would never want our children to stay infants (as precious as they are), but the visibility of the sin nature causes us to mourn.  On the other hand, the discoveries of toddlerhood delight us.

Once the babies are choosing to obey or not, the real work of parenting begins.  Though reputation is not the goal in and of itself, it is one of the fruits by which we know the plants are being tended.  And even tender seedlings need gardening!

However, if we start when they are young, we will be amply rewarded for the effort.  This week I revisited one of my favorites, Pride and Prejudice.  Says Mr. Darcy’s housekeeper, who has known him since he was four years old: “But I have always observed that they who are good-natured when children are good-natured when they grow up; and he was always the sweetest-tempered, most generous-hearted, boy in the world.''

Of his own upbringing, Mr Darcy shares further insight: “I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit.”

For good or bad, what we do with our children in their very early years really does make a difference.  Not that mistakes cannot be overcome or corrected, but it is so much easier to do it right the first time. 

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”