My husband and I went out to dinner recently with out-of-town friends passing through on their way back from vacation. They are much younger than we are, so they are still in the thick of parenting. They were saying things like, “Please get out from under the table” and “Don’t drink all your apple juice before your dinner gets here” to their crew throughout the meal. It has been many years since we have been in that phase of family life. We laughed after they returned to their hotel, because I said to my husband, “I forgot what it’s like to go out with little kids” at the same time he said to me, “They were so busy!”
Our lives are very quiet by comparison. To be fair, because we only had one child, I don’t know that our family ever made as much motion and noise as those three young children did that night. Our son is in college now, and this summer he is living in Guam for a three-month internship, so the raucous energy of a child in the house has given way to whole evenings in which we listen to music in the living room and then take the dog for a walk. Parenting at this stage looks like a lot of listening and sharing via text message or FaceTime.
It makes sense to us that parent-child relationships look different given the stage of life that the child is in. What seems less clear to us is our own relationship with our heavenly Father at various stages and phases of our own spiritual life. Sometimes we need him desperately because of a crisis, while other times we sense an easy companionship with him because the path we are on is relatively smooth. And we wonder if there is something wrong in our relationship because of that kind of dichotomy. I think of the image from Psalm 131:2 in moments like this, “But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content.” I think this passage shows us that our relationship with God can look different depending on the season. The psalmist here speaks of trust and patience and the kind of relationship with God that resembles a child who has been weaned and is no longer nursing. This child is not a desperate newborn who can only respond instinctively to the hunger reflex with screams; this child is older and knows a bit about the mother now. The child trusts the mother will feed him, and so he is with his mother out of a sense of comfort and love.
A while back I watched this kind of scene play out in my neighborhood. One of our neighbors is a married couple living with their aging parents. What caught my eye this particular day was the older father riding a bicycle by our house. I watched as he continued to their home and got off in the driveway to his waiting daughter. They both inspected the bike and gestured for a moment before she hopped onto the bike and took off down the street in the opposite direction. The father walked to the edge of the driveway, his head turned to watch her departing figure. This was not a dad helping a young child learn how to ride a bike; both people were well into adulthood and both knew how to ride, and yet the scene was just as tender, if not more so, because of the way she waited for him initially and then the way he stood there and watched for her. Had he been testing a new bike for her first? Had she pointed out some flaw to him and he fixed it for her? Or were they simply enjoying the experience of sharing a bike on a beautiful day?
While we will never truly outgrow our need of God, we can rest easy that the way in which we need him may change over time, in a way that resembles our own relationships with our parents. We may find ourselves needing God like we need oxygen at certain moments, but we also may find ourselves watching for him to come around the corner so that we can take off on the next adventure with him, and both are beautiful expressions of relationship.
Jessica
Scheuermann
Jessica is a part of our Christ’s Church family and serves as Academic Resource Commons Director & English Professor at our ministry partner, Ozark Christian College.
Pictured here with her husband, Ryan, and son, Josh.
