what your kids taught me about God

It’s not all about my kids.

I know I’m breaking a cardinal rule of mommy blogging with that one. But this truth runs deep in my tired mama bones:

It’s not about me and mine.

I can’t shake the stubborn, squirming fact that this call to motherhood – this gift I took into two shaking hands when the two lines on the test blurred clear to pregnant and I flung open the bathroom door to tell a father (because he was finally a father!) that everything had changed – this beautiful, exhausting vocation is not simply to the three children whose scuffed shoes are tumbled across our front hall rug.

It’s a call to stretch my heart into a mother’s love for all children.

To burst beyond the limits of what I want to cling to as mine, safe and small. To peer into the pain of how the world’s violence and brokenness can crush millions of hearts just like mine – mothers who carried babies and nursed babies and soothed babies and loved babies. To remember how small but mighty shifts can happen once we start seeing each other.

My three wee ones may be the lens through which I view this parenting story, but they are not the whole story. The story is about all of us.

And your children have shaped me, too.

Your kids are starting new schools, clutching those tiny cartooned backpacks or hiding nervous eyes behind teenage bangs. Your kids are braving bullies on the playground or tackling learning disabilities with this year’s IEP.

Your kids are teaching me that God fills us with courage from our earliest days.

Your kids are widening what they know of love, welcoming a new baby or foster sibling into their home. They’re fumbling into tender new friendships after a cross-country move. They’re learning what it means to mourn a grandparent who has gone beyond.

Your kids are teaching me that God’s love is inexhaustible.

Your kids are grown (if any of us can place that verb in past tense). They’re off to college with extra-long twin sheets for the dorm bed or they’re waving goodbye from the International Departures gate. They’re finally starting their first real job and going off your phone plan, or they’re having sweet, small babies of their own.

Your kids are teaching me that God longs for each of us to grow.

Your kids are still not here. They are desperately wanted dreams, slipping just out of reach again this month. They are hopes and glimmers and the mystery of not-yet, but you still love them wildly.

Your kids are teaching me that God is the Source of Life Itself.

Your kids are teaching me because their lives are bound up with mine. And it haunts me, this Body of Christ, this woven-togetherness.

Because what happens when we re-member each other back together is that all the rigid boundaries quiver and crumble. My family. My house. My kids. My life. No. Ours.

One shared stream, and it is one holy blood that pulses in our veins.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

Mother Teresa never bore a baby herself, but how many pausing photos have we seen of her, wrinkled eyes smiling, sickly scrawny newborn pressed to her cheek, love touching love in the filth of Calcutta’s gutters?

She understood this truth in flesh and bone, and they called her mother for it.

The children who don’t have enough rice to scrape together for a meal, whose dry tongues crack for clean water to drink, who toss and turn to sleep terrified of gunshots outside or abuse from down the hall – they tug on my heart, too. They have to.

Otherwise I have not changed. I have not let my children change me – these wriggling babies whose bodies were once held within my skin, whose hearts beat beneath mine, whose life was sustained by my own.

And they have changed me mightily. 

So I have to keep probing this uncomfortable truth. It’s not about me and mine. It’s about yours, and theirs, and all the ones I will never know face-to-face.

It has to be ours.