Is this not just as unfaithful? Is it not just as fatal, but in tiny, tiny increments?

I’ve titled this post analogous grace, because I want to deal with how God uses things He has created to reveal aspects of himself and how he works through these roles in the world around us. To give an example of what I mean, think about the following words/titles/roles: Father, Wife, Husband, Lord, Church, Shepherd, Bride, Son, King, Priest, etc. Each of these words are well known to us and have strong and definite meanings. Each of these words are also used by God to describe either Himself or something that He relates to in an important way.

As before, in this post, my goal is not to convince you of a Sovereign God, but to bring together separate ideas. If you believe in a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, outside of time, and who sustains the world, and this God refers to Himself as our Father and us His Sons and then institutes a human role of father and son, then it is hard to avoid the idea that the role of a Father is representative of certain aspects of God.

Let me take this idea one step further and say this as well, a father is different from a king,which is different from a church elder, which is different from a father, and so on. What I mean to say by this, is that while each of these roles may have some overlap between them in what they do, they are each different from one another specifically because they represent different aspects of God. This also means that what is good for a father to do, may not necessarily be good for a government to do, may not necessarily be good for a church to do, may not necessarily be good for a son to do, and so on. Because God has invested some aspect of Himself in each of these roles, it is reasonable to believe that He would tend to bless when someone in one of these roles is acting in a way that represents Him correctly.

This is why churches must be very careful to not supplant the role of family and or government, why government must be careful to not supplant the role of church or family, and why family must not supplant church or government. It is why a husband must not become the wife, and why the wife must not become a husband, why bride and bridegroom are important distinctions, and so on. Each of these specific things bears witness to God and the relationships that He has established to teach us more of him. And because grace is tied up in the specific work that God is accomplishing, we should not be surprised that he would bless certain actions if performed by a father and curse them if performed by a church. And that is the heart of what I mean by analogous grace, that God has drawn analogies for us to better know Him, and we had best be mindful of them.

What do you say? Is this off the mark or does it have the ring of truth? Let me know.

I have seen the mother, the wife, the girl,
sitting at her bedside, her dead child in her hands
weeping on his upturned face.
There is nothing selfish there.
She is broken, and weary.
She is full of pain, and strangely, guilt.
It is something that I can barely know.

I am most familiar with the man in the room
the one who stands behind her,
who believes that because she is broken, he must be whole,
who cries, but silently
who looks down through tear filled eyes,
and loves them both.

Not the foolish kind you made as a child,
but a real promise,
the sort you have been practicing to make
your whole life long.

Sometimes my wife and I will lay like that,
our fingers barely touching,
or her knee against my thigh,
or the heel of her foot pressed against the sole of mine.

Any more would be too much,
any more would break the spell.
It is that tiny, tiny touch, the barest sensation of contact
that is the promise to each other

“Who else could I lie with in this way,”
is what you are saying.
“Who else’s hand or knee or heel could feel
like it belongs to someone else and yet be mine?”

Let me know what you think.

A child changes that. Free time suddenly dwindles, days and night inexplicably become both longer and shorter, typically expanding or contracting as necessary to most effectively limit your perceived freedom. Everyone becomes more stressed out. Throw a little sickness or depression into the mix and you’ve got a custom designed crash-course entitled The Selfish You: Learning How To Defeat the Me-Monster. For those of you who don’t have children yet, I am not joking.

To be fair, the reason that a child can be so shocking to the system is that the experience challenges our beliefs regarding the purpose of our lives. Someone who is already living a life based on sacrifice, humility, and unselfishness, will notice only the blessings that a child brings: the first smile, the first laugh, the feel of the tiny head resting on their shoulder. To the selfish man, these things seem like such consolation prizes. “Look at all that I gave up,” screams the selfish soul, “and all I get is laughs and smiles? I could have rented About a Boy or My Life and saved myself the trouble”.

Where am I going with all this? That’s a fair question. It’s partly a confessional on my part, an admission of my own failures, and an attempt to be more transparent, but it’s also an attempt to frame a question. Does this resonate with other first and second time parents? I have two children now, Gavin will be two near the end of May and Petra is going on eleven weeks. In many ways, the second child was harder than the first, but the first taught us so much that it’s hard to really compare them. God says that the fruit of the womb is his reward, and his blessings tend to be things that go against our nature (Matthew 5:11-12, Isaiah 55:8) How does this thinking compare with what others have experienced? Has God used children or marriage to move you toward responsibility and away from selfishness?

While it is true that Scripture says that children are an heritage of the Lord, and that the fruit of the womb is his reward, and I am very much of the opinion that someone who is actively trying to prevent God from giving them said heritage/reward needs to reexamine their actions in the light of Scripture, I think it is worth looking at what Genesis 1:26-31 has to say about God, couples, children, and what is good, and then to think about these things in light of Isaiah 5:20.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
(Genesis 1:26-31)

Two things are worth pointing out here:

1. When God created the man and his wife, he created them without children
2. God said that they were good

That’s it. End of story. I don’t want to make too big a deal about this, but I’ve met enough couples that are childless and that do not want to be childless and most of them were struggling with the preconception¹ that “if God doesn’t give you a child right away or at all, he hates you”, and Scripture doesn’t support that. God withheld children from Abraham and Sarah for years to give Himself glory and to make His own name great. So don’t be discouraged. It’s ok to want a child, in fact, it’s Scriptural to want a child, but because God hasn’t given you one doesn’t mean that he hates you. Enjoy your marriage, enjoy your husband or your wife. Treasure this time together. For whatever reason, God has decided that you need it.




¹ pun slightly intended

It’s midnight
and I’m lying in my bed,
trying not to think about you.
I close my eyes
and I see your face
your smile turned on me full force
and your dark eyes
staring into mine
as deep as the night sky
and full of their own constellations

I remember how we began…
with a quick and startling glimpse,
into each other’s lives.
Little pieces of conversations, emails,
and late night phone calls,
beginning the gentle process of my life slipping into yours,
and your life flowing into mine; of our hearts, teaching one another,
that love is not a dream.There is no end to love like this,
For I loved you before I knew your name
You are the love I thought I’d never find,
The part of me I thought, would never be complete,
You are my heart, my life, the better part of me.
There is no end to love like this…
How could there be?

Do I love you?
I have asked myself that question a million times
…afraid of speaking before hearing your reply,
…knowing yours and waiting still,
…knowing mine and holding back my voice,
…knowing the question like an old familiar friend,
and wondering at times,
if asking
isn’t just a part
of loving.

I love you, and I live in your eyes
I wear you, as the smile on my face
you are, so very much a part of me
not something added in haste
but something I have needed
from the day I first drew breath

We had a baby girl this past December, and while it was joyous, we’ve had a difficult time with postpartum depression. My wife had a bit with our first child but it wasn’t quite as bad. Some of it is just due to differences between the two children, but I think (from hearing the same thing from many women who have had 4+ children) that girls are harder on the woman than boys are (even the Torah says the period of rest after childbirth is longer after a girl). So it’s been difficult. I’ve spent a lot of time at night praying, dreading when our daughter would cry, knowing that each time she screamed that Susan was battling with how she felt, struggling with thoughts she did not choose to have. It would be foolish for me to suggest that she was the only one struggling.

There has been an aspect of humility in all of this; I realized that I had not prepared my family in some ways for the challenges of a new child, that I had not been spending time in the Word of God with my wife like I should have been. I had let the world inform our minds on the value of the home, and on the value of children. And so there were many hours spent in prayer: Dear God please help my child to have faith so that she will not demand to be held constantly, please help my wife to call upon you, to cast her cares upon you, to take the thoughts she is having captive. Please help me to be wise in my words, prompt in my actions. Help me to be not so foolish as I have been, Above all else, thank you for this child, thank you for these sleepless nights, thank you for showing me my failures before they cost me more than they already have. It is getting better, much better, but it is still on occasion difficult. The real difficulty is in not falling back into old habits as I see improvement, in believing that the crisis is over, that I can return to my foolish ways without consequence.

There is more about these things that I would like to say, but they can come later. For now, this is sufficient. For those of you who read this, how does this compare to your own experiences? How did you deal with similar struggles?

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Now, here’s the challenge, examine your definition and see if it fits so that God loved the world and also loved his Son (who he was sending to die at the hands of cruel and hateful men). I think there are lots of “equations” like this in Scripture that force us to stretch our idea of something. As always, feedback is appreciated, and, Lord willing, will be responded to.