Monthly Archives: February 2013

It’s too hard…

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Motherhood is exhaustingMotherhood is exhausting, the most difficult job on earth. It’s a massive responsibility, it’s emotionally draining, and it’s around-the-clock.

No young woman can properly prepare for what her own motherhood will be like. She can read books, ask veteran moms, babysit for other people’s children, and make detailed preparations while she’s pregnant. But when the baby actually arrives, she’s in for an incredible shock. Surrendering virtually all of her prior freedoms isn’t easy, and sometimes she sheds tears over the many sacrifices her new role forces her to make.

“Is it too much to ask for a single night’s sleep?” she says.

The answer is yes.

But what about the babies being mothered? Women sometimes view them as tiny dictators who rule without mercy, but in reality babyhood isn’t easy either. For example, our little Emerald is in the early stages of teething. She drools like a waterfall and continually gnaws on her pudgy fists, biting down hard with her toothless gums.

Gnawing fists

Every so often, while in a good mood and playing happily with her rattles,  she cries out in pain. That’s because her baby incisors are slowly cutting their way through her gums, forcing a path where none exists. And it hurts! So as her mom endures the hard work of parenting, she’s enduring, too.

Most of us find it difficult to see a situation from another’s point of view. We look from the outside and make the best analysis we can, but without experiencing it ourselves, we can’t really know. Fathers can’t be mothers, which sometimes frustrates the mothers. But mothers can’t be fathers, either, and aren’t able to fully understand the emotions and stresses of that role.

Jesus was (and is) a pro at analyzing the needs of others. That’s because he willingly dropped from royal status to commoner, a supernatural downgrade beyond our understanding. When we talk about freedoms being taken away, he forfeited the most. And Scripture lets us know the reason: to become one of us.

He stepped inside the experience of overworked mothers, teething babies, burdened fathers, and all the rest. And because of that, he’s the one exception to the general truth that no one fully understands someone else’s plight. Actually, he does.

So when young mothers feel no one knows how thoroughly spent they are, they should know that Jesus does. All of us can be confident he’s “on the inside” of our struggles and pressures, since he can accurately say, “I’ve been there. I know exactly how you feel.”Not yet, but someday

And as soon as little Emerald can say the word Jesus (which will be right after she gets her first teeth), we’ll tell her all about him.

Jesus… “understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same testings we do, yet he did not sin. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.” (Hebrews 4:15-16)

Hard to Focus

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It’s been snowing again in Michigan, bringing winter’s unique beauty to the landscape. In an effort to send a picture-text to my grandchildren, I’ve tried again and again to capture a blizzard-in-progress. But the camera, whether it’s my phone or the old fashioned kind, has trouble knowing what to focus on.

Unfocused snow

One picture will be of a distant tree with blurred snowflakes in the foreground. The next might highlight one snowflake with everything else unclear.

People can have the same problem, not sure what should be the main focus. A husband might zero in on his job, which then blurs his commitment to his family. A wife might make her children the focal point, which isn’t fair to her husband. And for those of us who are Christians, our main focus can easily stray from the Lord and his Word.

But how can we check ourselves against focusing on the wrong things?

The first step is to decide what our main focus should be, just like a camera chooses one small part of a complicated scene to hone in on. My iPhone camera has a focus feature that activates as I touch the part of the picture I want it to focus on. A small blue square pops up in response to my finger, and when I “click” the camera shutter button, that area of the picture comes out in sharp focus.

The problem with photographing snowflakes is that they’re always moving. A camera’s focus-feature gets confused when it can’t successfully zero in on one item.

That’s true for us, too. When everything in our world keeps changing, we get confused about how to keep the main thing the main thing. It may even be difficult to determine what the main thing ought to be. And that’s why it’s important we choose to focus on those things that never change. As far as I know, it’s a very short list: (1) God, and (2) his Word. If I let my focus wander from those, life can get blurry in a hurry.

We can know beyond all doubt that God is who he says he is and will do what he says he’ll do. He won’t waver, change, or back away from any of his promises. And the intense love he has for us will never lessen.

Five fingers

Back in the 1960’s when Dad took Kodachrome pictures on a manual-focus camera, he’d line up his subjects in an effort to get a family photo but would have trouble finding someone to focus on who wasn’t wiggling. So he’d say, “Someone hold up five fingers and keep them still!” He’d turn his lens until the fingers were perfectly focused and then click the shutter. Because the faces were gathered around the hand, the whole group was perfectly in focus.

It works the same way when we close in tight to the Lord. Finding the right focus is easy after that.

“The Lord’s plans stand firm forever; his intentions can never be shaken.” (Psalm 33:11)

Too smart for her own good.

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Yesterday I blogged about Penny, our well-loved Golden Retriever who had to be put down after her violent attack. Up to that point, however, she’d been a good family dog.

She was smart, memorizing tricks after only one or two tries, and seamlessly running through the whole lot of them with one command as if she was doing a gymnastics floor routine.

Penny

We wanted Penny to enjoy the expanse of our half-acre yard, so we installed an underground electric fence linked to her collar. If she crossed it, she’d get a jolt. We could regulate the level of what she felt from mild to severe, as well as modify how close she could get to the current before receiving the shock.

It wasn’t as cruel as it sounds. As Penny neared the wire, her collar would slowly click, ticking faster as she approached. If she obeyed the collar’s signals, she never had to feel a shock. During her first training session, the fence man said she’d figured it out faster than any dog he’d ever worked with.

All went well for several weeks until one day we came home to find Penny romping around the neighborhood. Gradually her wanderlust increased, and whether we were gone or in the house, every few days she’d escape from the yard.

None of us could figure it out. We called the fence guy who told us to “up” the current as an incentive for her to stay inside the wire. Although we did, she didn’t. The point of the electric fence was to give her as much freedom as possible without letting her run in front of a car or get lost. But she viewed it as confinement from which she needed to break free.

Sometimes we do the same thing with the protective parameters God puts around us. When he says it’s wiser if we don’t do a certain thing, our will immediately says, “But I want to!” That kind of rebellion began with Eve, was followed by Adam, and has been humankind’s M.O. ever since, despite the trouble that usually results.

But God loves us too much to give up on his parameters-program. He “ups” the current until we finally accept that his limitations are for our benefit.

As for Penny, she continued to escape, though none of us had ever seen her shoot through the current. Then one day the mystery was solved. Our intelligent dog had figured out not only where the wire was buried but how high the current reached. She was leaving the yard pain-free by jumping over an invisible fence that was only 24 inches tall.

In the end we outsmarted our smart dog though, increasing the current to 6 feet, and as the trainer said, “We finally put some religion in her.”

“Those who are dominated by the sinful nature think about sinful things, but those who are controlled by the Holy Spirit think about things that please the Spirit.” (Romans 8:5)