God Fathering
My son Steele is 2. That comes with some drama and excitement of its own. Over Thanksgiving we were staying at Grandma and Grandpa’s house and the kids were enjoying all the freedom and junk food that comes along with it. We had settled down in the evening to watch a movie and for the kids to just fall asleep on the floor by the TV. As we were watching, Steele starts to wimper over in the corner by himself. So being the caring father that I try to be I headed over there to investigate the problem.
After getting through the tears and stuttering speech of a crying two year old, I find out that Steele wants a chip. A pretty simple request that I could have very easily made happen. It was too late at night for snacks, so I told him that he had enough chips for one day and that he needed to lay his head down and go to sleep. This set him off and it turned into full on crying, mumbling, tears and snot.
I decided that he was just exhausted from a long day of playing at Grandpa’s house and I carried him into bed and laid down with him and I just held him as the crying settled into sobbing and the sobbing ushered in the much needed sleep.
As I lay there, I began to think of what was going on in Steele’s mind. ‘Why can’t I just have a chip?’ ‘I have been munching on them all day, just one more.’ ‘Don’t you see how bad I’m hurting here dad?’
Sometimes we think these little problems we are dealing with down here on earth are huge and we demand that God make them work out the way we want, right now. We start to cry and wine and kick and scream. We cripple ourselves and we become paralyzed and unproductive. We put a little problem so close to our face that we cannot see the big picture. All we see is this thing in front of our face.
Our father, God, can see a big picture that we barely have the slightest grasp of. I knew the chip was not a good thing for Steele at that moment, and I learned a few things about God.
We simply may not understand why God chooses to grant or withhold what we want or think we need. And even if we did, we may not even get it in the first place. I could have sat Steele up and told him all the reasons that I wasn’t going to give him a chip, but he just wouldn’t understand. It was simply beyond his capability to understand…but one day when he is a dad, he will see a bigger picture. So I just held him and told him I love him.
Awesome! We learn so much from being parents.
Thanks for the lesson. I needed it!
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