Parenting: In which my entire concept of God changed when they were born

by Sarah Styles Bessey | Twitter: @emergingmummy

Every night, before my husband Brian and I go to bed, we go to our two tinies’ bedrooms. I tuck them back into their quilts because they always kick off their covers. I pick up my daughter’s blankie and tuck it back beside her. We restore our son’s blankets to their rightful place. We pick up all the books taken out and looked at–no doubt after bedtime–by the dim of the nightlight. We brush the hair off their foreheads.

We look at each other in the semi-darkness and clutch our hearts, Brian whispering about how beautiful they are and how he can’t believe they’re ours sometimes.

I always end up saying something about how they have not changed one single bit since they were babies. I look at them in their beds and it’s like they’re every age they ever were, all at once, still the babies I watched sleep for hours, just to make sure they were still breathing.

Perspective

When we go to bed, we lie together, his hands resting on my stretchmarks, feeling the kicks of a new life arriving in the spring. We talk through their days, figuring out where we need to adjust, where we need to let go, where we need to lay it down. We pray for them and try to understand their motivations, their reasons for what they do. We rejoice over every small victory and our hearts break over every disappointment. We get a bit ticked off, on their behalf, at the kids who were mean to them at the playground or preschool. We try and see the bigger picture of why and how they do the things they do.

It doesn’t really matter if it was a good day or a not-so-good day. It doesn’t matter if it was a day when I felt like a good mother–or not. It doesn’t matter if Joe has absolutely no concept of an indoor voice or Anne practiced my old trick of selective hearing, making me think there’s definitely something to karma. Meanwhile, there’s a baby’s heel permanently lodged in my ribs these days. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t perfectly behaved little angels (because heaven knows, are any of us?)

It just matters that they’re ours. And we love them so much, we can hardly breathe with gratitude that they exist.

God as Parent

Since becoming a parent, I admit that my entire concept of God has changed.

Right now, all I see, all I feel, all I read and know comes through this filter: God is a parent, above all else. God describes himself most as Father but the Psalms and Isaiah also speak to God’s Mother-heart.

If I, in my regular-woman self, am able to love my children so deeply and wildly and purely it must only be because God first loved us. It must be that this gift of parenthood, this gift of a selfless Mama-Papa-love, is given from a God who knows and loves and invites us to feel even a small fraction of his love for us.

Loved

And if we can love them without condition or expectation, how much more can our Papa love us? If we can love them for who they are–not who we wish them to be–how much more does our Papa embrace who we were created to be? (And why do we all feel like we need to fit some sort of a cookie-cutter image of what following Jesus looks like?)

If we love our children this way, then we, my friends, are also deeply loved, indeed.

At night, I picture God in this love without condition, standing over us while we sleep, clutching his heart over how beautiful we are, longing for more and better for us, knowing us better than we know ourselves, seeing a bigger picture, longing for a deeper relationship and loving us so much that it is the entire story.

About Sarah:

Sarah Bessey lives in Abbotsford, BC with her husband and two (nearly three) tinies. She’s a happy clappy Jesus-lover, non-profit marketing director, blogger and simple living/social justice wannabe. She blogs at www.emergingmummy.com and is on Twitter @emergingmummy.