In the Garden
Jennifer and I have been blessed with four wonderful kids. Of course, one is married and the others are well into their teens, but they’re still our kids. While being “empty nesters” is still several years away, we’ve already decided that this is going to be a difficult transition for us. There are trials in the child-rearing years for sure. But it’s also been so much fun.
I could write a book about how I’ve learned God’s love by how loving parents spend time with their own children. The parallels are deep. I’m a better human being because of what these kids have taught me through the challenges of raising them. It’s through these challenges that our relationships have deepened. The Lord could have just as easily made humans to multiply by “splitting” like single-celled bacteria. But I’m convinced that He arranged the process of reproduction, childbearing, and training to be the slow, steady, often heart-wrenching process that allows us to better understand His relationship with us.
While this principle may be obvious for any parent whose spirit sees all life through the Lord’s lens, there are times when He makes the point especially clear…
Despite having been brought up the same way, each of our kids is unique. But sometimes a child comes along that is vastly different from the others. The statistical outlier. In our family, that child is Sarah.
Sarah is the third child and the “middle” daughter. While I’ve been able to witness the birth of three of our children, Sarah was born in 2005 while I was serving in Iraq. The first time I saw her in person was at the airport when I returned home. She was already three months old. From the moment I laid eyes on that beautiful little girl, I knew that she would be different from the others.
While our other kids were emotionally adjusted, Sarah evolved into what some developmental psychologists would call a “spirited child”. This did not mean that she was prone to tantrums. Rather, her modus operandi was to absorb the prevalent emotion from the room, amplify it, and then express it. If people were sad, she would cry. If the family was happy, she was ecstatic. Sarah always marched to her own beat. She didn’t perceive personal risk the way others do and was always doing dangerous things without any kind of mental filter. I recall one time how she was determined to drag her tricycle up to the top of a slide to ride it all the way down. (I stopped her at the top only after allowing her to push off to see if she would actually go through with it.) Another time I caught her straddling her six-month-old baby sister in the floor while starting to feed her a whole slice of pepperoni pizza.
What child-raising techniques worked on the others rarely worked on her. As she approached her teens, I always felt that she was precariously teetering on a precipice. I secretly feared that she would either do something incredible with her life or something dreadful. Raising Sarah was like choosing which wire to cut to disarm a bomb. Each parenting decision was a choice to cut the green wire or the red wire. While we did our best, we often felt we had little control on her ultimate trajectory. We knew that the kind of person she would become rested in the grace of God.
Having a relatively large family, we tended to do things together. But while Sarah never expressed it with words, she craved the individual attention of her loving father. While not easy, we did our best to schedule individual time for each child.
When Sarah was nine years old, she and I went over to the local botanical gardens just to spend the time together by ourselves. While the memories are sketchy, I seem to recall that she was very excited about it. No brother, no sisters. Just Sarah and Daddy. There was a special exhibit that month that featured little fairy figurines hidden throughout the garden. Someone had taken the time to make little fake doors outside of trees with little fake windows where their “homes” were. I recall this was very intriguing to her. She was fascinated by the little figures and their dwellings.
After a lot of walking and talking we ended up in a shady area with several full-size hammocks. She wanted to lay with me in a hammock. I assumed this would be a quick activity for the novelty of laying in a hammock. But she explained that she wanted to snuggle in the shade with Daddy for a while and just rock peacefully in the shade. Of course, we had nothing better to do.
While we laid there watching the clouds go by, it was as if time stood still. I took a glance at her face and witnessed one of the biggest, most genuine smiles that I’ve ever seen. She was with me and I was with her. It was just the two of us and it meant everything to her.
At that moment the Lord spoke to me.
It wasn’t an audible voice. But from His indwelling Spirit, I vividly recall His revealing the following thought to my mind:
“Michael, this is what I want it to be like for us. Just rest with Me and let’s enjoy one another’s company. We don’t always have to have an agenda. The feelings you have for Sarah right now–this is how I feel about you. I love you and want our moments to be just like this all the time. Let me see life through your eyes. I find joy in your presence. Allow yourself to find joy in Mine.”
It’s one thing to understand truth in your mind. But it’s an entirely different thing to know something when the Lord reveals it to you by His Spirit. We don’t soon forget revelation. Even today, I’m reminded of this memory when I think of the words of the old hymn In the Garden by C. Austin Miles. The words are a perfect parallel to the day I spent with Sarah in a garden, where the veil between this physical world and the Kingdom wore thin…
I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my hear,
The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me that I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
C. Austin Miles, In the Garden
Let’s reject the idea of the “absent father” God and be reminded that the Lord’s greatest desire is severe intimacy in our relationship with Him. The temple veil was torn so that we can be as close to Him as we allow ourselves to be.
Image Credit: Image by Living in Monrovia via Flickr. Shared using CC BY-SA 2.0.