Raising Children: My Spaghetti-Smeared Generation

Farmer holds a few ordinary seeds in his hand.

But he doesn’t see seeds.  He also doesn’t see, or rather, doesn’t dwell on the work he’s about to give himself to.

OK he does see the seeds, and dirt, and sweat and weeds.  But it’s what lies beyond the seeing….it’s the VISION.

He really sees a swelling harvest from that handful of humble seeds–a miracle he really can’t fully understand.

He sees results of his labor and the fruit of his hands and the many who will be blessed by it for years to come.

Because next year, his seeds will yield more seeds.

And some days he’ll be scratching in the dirt and sweating and seeing nothing but weeds.  But he knows what’s underneath if he’ll only persevere, and he has the FAITH required to believe it will burst forth from the ground.

Someone asked me how I could be excited about a ninth baby.

“Because I don’t see a baby”.

Well, yes I do, and he/she is magnificently more wonderful than a handful of seeds!

But I see more than a baby.

I see a harvest…the fruit of our love, the physical reminder of “two becomes one”, the labor of our hands through the years, a heritage, for me, from my Father.

My vision goes beyond that sweet little face and all the messes I know I will clean up, and the mid-night feedings that aren’t easy, the squabbles and the stains on the furniture, the tears and laughter, and the days I just want quiet…

There’s a whole generation underneath that spaghetti-smeared face that’s been given to me.

And it’s worth it.

And I want to be here when the harvest is fully ripe….

But I won’t.

Because the seeds we plant now will grow beyond us and the harvest will become unable to be measured.

So I will keep pulling the weeds, planting the seeds, nurturing, watering, tending and praying for growth, thanking God for the miracles.

And I will have the FAITH to believe that His glory will burst forth.

We Don’t Love Children, We Love Drywall

My brother and his wife just announced that they were expecting their third baby.  (Welcome to the world of “the large family”, bro!)

Someone asked about our parents’ reaction to the news.

“Oh, they’re very excited!”

To which the (Christian) someone responded,

“They have 50 grandchildren and they’re still excited?!” (That was sarcasm, by the way; they have 14.)

We know the reality behind the joke–“more is only better if you really value the thing multiplying in your life“.  Money, accolades, vacations–we can’t get enough.  Cavities?  No more, thank you.

We say we love children, but we don’t put our money where our mouth is. “How do  you afford all those children?” Is that question an attempt to relieve the conscience?  Or do we really dislike multiplication so much we want to make the parents feel guilty? All the while, we’re borrowing money for bigger houses and get high fives for that.  As Kevin Swanson says:  “We LOVE drywall!”

“The very analogy of Christian marriage is to demonstrate fruitfulness just as we expect the church to multiply and fill the earth.  How can we wish for our churches to grow and our families to shrink?”

I’m not talking here of splitting hairs over when and if it’s ever OK to prevent children; we’re way beyond that.  I’m asking, Read more »

The Case For Siblings (When Mom Has Another Baby)

Loved this article…every word resonated.

“But everyone else seems to think that a new baby is bad for the other kids. Dozens of times, I’ve had strangers peer around my enormous belly to coo at the toddler, “Aww … now you won’t get to be the baby anymore.”

Thanks, lady. Thanks for informing my child that she’s suffering. Luckily, she doesn’t know what you’re talking about—and neither do you.”

Read the rest of The Case for Siblings

More Thoughts on Special Needs Children and the God Who Creates Them

This thought-provoking comment comes from The Cottage Child, copied from the comment thread in part 1 of “Children With Disabilities.“  She made two extremely valid points of which we need to be reminded.  Thank you, Rachael.

“Another difficulty with this line of thinking, everything riding on physical perfection, is also why it’s become so incredibly expensive to have a baby period. (I realize lots of families have chosen home-birth, and I’m just going to tell you right now you’re better women than I am. )

But for those of us who are the standard ob/hospital delivery kind of gals, the pressure for endless testing (read: $$$$) begins from the minute you make the first appointment. If you are so brazen as to have children in your old age – say 37 – you’re pushed to have genetic testing sequences, amnio, multiple ultra sound screenings, and on and on and on. Politely decline most if not all, and watch the wave of contempt (I actually had a nurse roll her eyes at me) coming at you from every member of the staff. Hear the confused silence of the insurance company when you call to say “don’t pay that, they didn’t perform those tests” because many practices will attempt to bill them as a “package” for mid life pregnancies whether the tests are done or not.

Anyway, sorry for the mini-rant, but medicine itself is complicit in the obsession with “perfectly” healthy babies, with little regard for the deleterious effects much of the testing they do has on the baby (up to and including potential miscarriage), not to mention increasing the anxiety level of the mother. All presented as “so you can make the best decision for your family”. It’s more than a little creepy. I think a lot of it is dollar driven, but there’s an element to it that is trying to unravel the miracle – studied closely, the amazing part is that so many babies are born as we expect them to be.

I find it interesting that our current culture is CRAVING the hand-crafted stamp on everything right now – the imprint of the person who made an object is dear to us, it makes it special, unique,not cookie cutter or predictable. Everything, that is, except people. We can’t accept physical differences or disabilities as anything but less than the preferred standard. There’s no consideration that these differences are valuable or complimentary to us, forget beautiful, intentional even, in the sight of God. For a world bent on worshiping diversity, we don’t leave room, ultimately, for much but the superficial differences.”

Children With Disabilities: Perfect for Us: Part 1

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a girl or a boy, just as long as it’s healthy.”

Do you have any idea how loaded, how presumptuous that statement is?  And we hear it all the time.  I’ve said it myself.

Translation?  “Only healthy children are a blessing”. And that’s not what God’s Word says.

Do you want to see the slippery slope of a seemingly minor, yet glaring ethical error?

Countless babies with disabilities are being aborted every year. Worse than that, women are encouraged, counseled and made to believe “it’s the best thing”!  And that slope keeps getting steeper.

Because now we have to answer, “what’s a disability?”  Statistics show that parents abort children with an extra finger, a club foot, a facial abnormality, etc.

This is not a new idea, though.  Margaret Sanger unashamedly campaigned to eradicate, through birth control, “the defective and diseased elements of humanity”.

The logical results are upon us as we put to death millions of “the least of these”.  And following that we find ourselves on the brink of genetic engineering (“I already have a brown-eyed boy, I want a blue-eyed girl.”)  Once we started playing God, there’s no stopping.

At The Baby Conference, R.C. Sproul, Jr. shared a raw and heartfelt message about his little girl who has “smooth brain”.  She is 13, wears diapers, must be fed and needs help walking.  She also has violent seizures.

Paraphrasing his story:

“Her nickname is ‘Princess Happy’, because her smile is so big when I go to her bed each morning, that her eyes are nearly shut.  I reach down and scoop that baby up in my arms.  “Daddy made you pancakes, Shannon.“  I remember Jesus’ words…”I was hungry and you fed me…inasmuch as you did it unto the least of these, you did it unto Me.”

I look at Shannon again and I can’t believe the God of the universe would give me this opportunity to minister to Him…every day.  That he would tell us ‘Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven’, and here, Shannon is so innocent–she is my spiritual better, constantly showing me so much about the Kingdom.  I beg the Lord, “Please, please don’t take her.”

We don’t just break the heart of God when we kill these little babies who are less than perfect, but we rob ourselves of perhaps the greatest means God would use to show us His Kingdom, to keep us tender, to give us opportunity to minister to Him through the least of these, to allow us to embrace the cross of suffering and show the world the very picture of His mercy on us.  God’s perfect plan for us involves imperfection.  He has always delighted to use the weakest among us to demonstrate the greatness of Himself.

Our culture says “avoid hardship, eliminate suffering“.  We buy it, banish all sympathy for the child that will die to make a mother’s life easier, then use sympathy for ourselves to justify our heinous act.

Jesus Christ says, “Rejoice in your sufferings…”

God have mercy on us for our cruelty and ignorance.

God help us to say, “It doesn’t matter.  God is sending us the perfect child.”

Reasons I Don’t Want to Have a Million Children

Interview between Holly Elliff and Nancy Leigh Demoss

Holly:

“And I remember vividly the day he (husband) came out of his study and said, ‘God has just given me the neatest mental picture of someday sitting on my front porch and looking out and seeing scores of children out there. And we have every temperament type represented. And we have every spiritual gift represented. And our children know how to relate to everybody in the world because they lived with all different types of people.’

And he had this wonderful vision of what it would be like and I immediately said to him, ‘Well, that’s very easy for you to say because I’m the one wearing the stretch pants for the next 20 years. And I’m sorry, but I just don’t want to go there.’ ”

And I really did not want to go there. It was a very frightening thing to me to think of taking my hands off that control in my life. And it took me about six months to work through what I believed the Bible said about that whole issue. And I became an avid student of God’s Word and just began to search the Scriptures for every reference to children, to children as a blessing, to God’s sovereignty in that area as far as opening and closing the womb and looking, honestly, for a way to avoid releasing that area in my life because my preference at that point was not to relinquish that area to the Lord.

As I did that, over and over and over, I found the same things: that God was the Creator of life, that God knew who He wanted to create, He knew what we were going to look like, He had a plan for every person–that it was all His business. It was not what I wanted to find in the Scripture, but that’s what I kept encountering. And I remember vividly one night sitting down at my kitchen table with a legal pad and a sharp pencil and making a list. And at the top of the list I wrote, “Reasons I Don’t Want To Have A Million Children.” And I began to make a list of all the objections I had to what I was seeing in God’s Word.

Everything I had on the list was rooted in selfishness. It came down to whether or not I was better at making decisions than God was. And it suddenly became very clear to me that this was a heart issue, at least in my life. It was a matter of me choosing, just like I said…God was Lord in every other aspect of my life.

We prayed through what to do with our money, we prayed through where we were to pastor. When we bought a car, it was a huge issue that we prayed about and trusted God to give us direction. But in this area it was as if we had said, ‘This area is ours to determine and we will make this decision.’ And for the very first time I was confronted with the fact that I had never really said to the Lord, ‘What is Your will?’ ”

Nancy responds:

“And really, again, we’re saying this is the fundamental issue of life, Is Jesus Lord of every area of my life? And I like the way you made that so practical because you said, ‘We went to the Lord and said, ‘Lord, what do you want us to do in this area of our lives?‘ And the fact is, you and I are not totally free until we have released ourselves, our lives, our future, our marital status, our childbearing, every aspect of our lives fully to the control of Jesus Christ. And somehow, when we come under His control, then we find that we really are free.