A Lesson From My Babies

"Remain in me and I will remain in you." John 15:4

Many times I've considered my enormous love for my children and been encouraged knowing my love for them is weak, pathetic, and puny compared to God's love for them. I've found no comfort greater than reminding myself that God loves my children more deeply than I can. His love is perfectly pure, never tainted with selfish motives.

I've used this Father-God attribute many times for comfort and strength. But in reading Oswald Chambers recently, I recognized a part of the same analogy that has eluded me. In the mother child relationship, Oswald Chambers illustrated how a child obsesses over his mother to point out how I, as a child of God, am to be obsessed by Father God. He wrote, "A child's awareness is so absorbed in his mother that although he is not consciously thinking of her, when a problem arises, the abiding relationship is that with the mother. In the same way, we are to live and move and have our being in God, (Acts 17:28), looking at everything in relation to Him."

As I read that my mind flooded with memories of my children demonstrating this. They were ever in tune with my movements and activities and not even conscious of it.

I recalled when Christopher was 15 months old, he went to his bedroom to play. Down the hall in the kitchen I began to slice a fresh loaf of bread. The sound brought him running down the hall to me. I can still see his sparkling eyes, his excited grin, his rotund little body filling out those puppy pajamas as he sped toward me as fast as his little legs would carry him. No matter that he was at the opposite end of our long ranch style house, he was in tune with what I was doing.

When a child is sick, tired, or hurt he comes to the arms of his mother for comfort and assurance. When he takes those first steps, rides his bike without training wheels, goes potty in the toilet, he awaits the applaud and cheers of Mom. He looks to his mother as if she has all the answers to every question: why is the sky blue?, why is the grass green?, why did Mr Smith die? A mother is everything to her young child.

Just as mothers are at the forefront of their babies' lives, God is my parent and I'm to forever have God in the forefront of my life and mind. In his mother's presence, a baby needn't worry about a thing. In God's presence, I needn't worry as I can give all my cares to Him. I think of a baby at his mother's breast. Surely there isn't a grander picture of contentment. This is the kind of contentment I want to emulate in my relationship with my Father. Security, peace, and trust - I gave those things to my babies, yet mine was human and fallible. I want to fall into the arms of my God and soak in the perfect infallible security, peace, and contentment he gives.

Today I think of the security I saw in my children as they rested safely in my arms and this time, instead of seeing the picture of parental love, I see a baby healthfully obsessed with his mother. I want to be obsessed with my Father God in that same way.