Wonder. Awe and Wonder mixed together with love. That’s how being a father has changed me. Maybe that’s all you need to read. But let me try to fill in the gaps.
When my first child was born I remember the overwhelming love I felt for her in that moment so vividly. It was as if a dam had burst inside my soul and love came bubbling up and pouring out. It’s still pouring out.
I preached several sermons on the love of God after her birth that I never would have been able to preach had I remained childless. The love I felt for her opened up an existential avenue into the love of God that no amount of Scripture reading by itself could have produced. I understood why God granted us the privilege of parenting – we need earthly fathers, and to be earthly fathers if we are to understand the depth of his love. I looked at my little baby and said, ‘If I love her this much, then I have surely not understood the love of God. If his love for me as his child, through Jesus Christ, is greater than my love for this child – I should be shouting for joy every day of my life. I should be singing. My life should be a big happy comedy filled musical.
I was scared to have another child. I felt that there was surely no way I could love the second as much as the first. My heart was captive, there was no more love to give. So I thought.
When my second daughter was born I knew immediately that I was wrong. I was in a bit of a funk spiritually – though even those who knew me best wouldn’t have known it. Seminary had hardened me. I was cold. But she melted my heart anew.
I have often told my oldest daughter precisely what I said above – that I didn’t know if I could love anyone else as much as I loved her. But I explain: love is not like a pie. At least not love in the parental sense (marital love is wholly different). It is not something that has to be divided at all. Rather love is something that spontaneously generates and has no end. I didn’t have to love one child less to love the other more. Instead my love grew. The musical got happier and cheesier and more wondrous.
Then I discovered fairy stories (I dislike calling them tales, it seems so pejorative). I always wanted to read to my children. I hadn’t been read to, nor did I read, much when I was a kid. I always felt I had missed out. I was right.
I decided to read the Chronicles of Narnia (all seven books) to my daughter (she was four at the time). It seemed like a lofty goal. But it was a breeze (and a pleasure). Her love for the stories made me love them more. I had been missing something in my life. I had spent years studying theology and doctrine. There was a time, when I first became a Christian, that I had loved to read (as an act in itself). But that was long gone. I was a reading robot. I was a machine. I had read Calvin’s Institutes. I had read over a thousand pages of John Owen. I loved what I learned. But I didn’t like reading. My imagination was non-existent.
Narnia changed that. I suddenly found myself able to play pretend with my daughter. I suddenly found myself wanting to make up stories and write. And I certainly found myself wanting to read anything and everything that was anything like these books. I know what C.S. Lewis meant when he said George MacDonald baptized his imagination with Phantastees. Lewis baptized mine.
I won’t go into the boring details (many of which you can read on this blog) about my reading. I only want to say this. Being a Father filled my heart with love that had not been there to begin with, it sparked my imagination, it made me, perhaps for the first time in some sense, to look through the eyes of a child.
This has become a stream of consciousness at this point, but I must add this. Just a few months ago as I read The Princess and Curdie to my daughter, as we read of Curdie and his cohorts preparing for battle, and I looked up from my book and saw my daughter astride her toy horse, and beginning to blow her imaginary bugle, I thought – that is what being childlike is all about. She had no cares, no worries, only pure, unmitigated joy. She had entered the story. She had turned her eyes wholly off of herself. She, in that moment, had experienced the essence of humility – self-forgetfulness.
That leads me to Jesus’ famous words:
Matthew 18:3 and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’
I finally felt I had learned what he meant. Does he mean that we should be obedient? Certainly. Does he mean that we should take orders without questioning? I have no doubt. But more than these I believe he meant we must live in the awe and wonder and self-forgetfulness of a child.
Don’t get me wrong, I certainly understand that children are capable of an extreme sort of self-centeredness. I’m a good Presbyterian. I believe in the doctrine of total depravity. I can prove the doctrine by my own children alone. But they are capable of self-forgetfullness far more often than the typical adult.
I have learned to enjoy what my children enjoy in many respects. I have imitated them in many respects. I want to be the one hopping on the play horse and tooting the horn. I want to be the one singing goblin songs during the walk in the woods. As a matter of fact, I want the woods, I want them for the enchantment that they are. And trust me, they weren’t enchanted before I had kids. That spell had been broken years ago.
In summary, let me put it as clearly as I know how:
Parenthood is a strange paradox. It forced me to mature, to become more of a man. Yet it led me to become as a little child. It opened up a world of awe and wonder and imagination that I had never known.
Ephesians 3:14 ¶ For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named
Fatherhood springs from the Father. As a Father, he designates fathers. When we embrace that, we allow our children to become God’s ministers to us (‘from the mouth of babes’). They give us new eyes to see through. They give us new windows to look through. They point us to God, to awe, to wonder, to self-forgetfulness. That is, if we embrace our God appointed roles in their lives.
It might sound like I’m saying my children exist for my pleasure. But actually it is quite the contrary. For I have found that is by my living for their pleasure (true pleasure, the Christian Hedonist kind) that I gain joy.
God the Father, through Christ, gave me a heart for my children and my children gave me more of a heart for God. The blessed paradoxes. The love doesn’t get divided. It doesn’t get portioned out. It only grows. To love them more is to love Him more (so long as I don’t put them in His place), and to love Him more is to love them more.
Malachi 4:6 And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.
