As with most things in life, parenting is a balancing act. Some call it picking your battles --- and those battles, in the world of parenting revolve around how much candy will I let my son eat and how many crocodile tear whimpers can I tolerate after three days of no napping?
This conversation was a different kind of battle. It’s also a delicate dance letting your two year old formulate his own opinions of things while gently stretching his worldview and encouraging him to see the bigger picture. We were discussing God and when I asked what he thought about God he answered right away, “God is sad.”
An immediate knee jerk response was “oh, son! No!! God is….” but I didn’t say it. I didn’t continue. My two year old is right. I think God is sad. So much of the faith journey is walking alongside God --- its as is he is a tour-guide/companion/best friend/mentor/parent all in one. The complexities of God are endless. In the journey of life He pauses often to show us this and teach us that -- the things we come across along the way. See this sunset? I take delight in showing off my creativity and introducing your minds to the heavens, stealing your earthly thoughts to the realm above. Do you feel this pain? I too, am incredibly grieved, to see such injustice showing up in the courtroom, the church, the political agendas. Now what are you going to do about it?
But a two year old --- I want to teach him that God is good. That God has a good plan for His future. That God is strong and mighty and loving and powerful. But he is right, God is also sad. And I couldn’t tell him that God isn’t. My two year old has lived an entire year in a family mourning the loss of his sister. We have struggled to remember that God is good. We have nearly drowned in our sorrow. We are sad, tears flow readily, we don’t get out too much. Its a sad place, here in our home. But its like he taught the lesson to me --- God is sad too.
God, in His most perfect plan didn’t bring our Abby four days prior to birth, only to sweep her away. That would be cruel. The God I know is devastated over the loss of our baby girl. His heart is broken. His eyes are weeping, his soul is downcast because the world we live in is full of death and brokenness and tears and pain. It is too much. When we seek the heart of God and ask Him to show us His heart, He is faithful. He is a bereaved father who knows the pain of death ----- he knows what it feels like when death steals your most precious and fully innocent child. He knows how devastated we are -- how all we can do is look around our lives at the sad pieces ---- there are millions of them. And we can’t imagine how to put them together again…. But God does. God loves to pick up the pieces and restore. I’m holding on to that.
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