That’s My Mommy!

Megan Breedlove October 20, 2008 0 Comments

A couple times a week, the kids and I go to the YMCA. I enjoy working out by playing racquetball or lifting weights, and the kids enjoy the on-site childcare. The childcare takes place in a large room that has all kinds of different toys we don’t have at home, as well as a large-screen TV and a variety of videos. There are usually other children there for my kids to play with, too. Basically, my kids enjoy everything about going to the Y.

When we arrive, I drop the kids off in their room and go to the main building, where the fitness center is. When I’m done, I come back to get them.

And when I do, it’s one of the best moments of my day. Let me tell you why.

At this writing, Lindsey is two-and-a-half. She is completely adorable—cute, funny, quirky, and joyful. She enjoys herself in the play room, but when Mommy returns…well, for her, that’s even better.

When Lindsey sees me coming to pick them up, it’s like it’s Christmas morning for her. She grins and dances up and down, or starts running toward me, laughing with happiness.

But the reason why it’s the best moment of my day is because she’ll say to the childcare workers, as she points to me, “That’s my mommy! That’s MOMMY!”

Oh, she is so excited to see me. She’s so excited she has to tell someone about it—has to make sure someone notices that her mommy is here. Usually, she can barely contain herself long enough to point this out once or twice before she is impelled to run to me, wrapping her arms around me and squeezing with all her little-girl strength.

When she reacts to my presence like this, I can just feel the love for her welling up in my heart. I get excited, too, and I can’t wait to wrap my arms around her. Oh, the incalculable pleasure of having my child delight in my presence!

Dear sisters, do we delight in the presence of our Heavenly Father the same way? Do we bring joy to His heart by the sheer exuberance of our delight in Him?

I suspect that many times, we don’t. I know that I have been guilty of taking God for granted at times. I’ve ignored Him, or forgotten about Him at times.

Maybe you have, too.

Or maybe you have spurned Him at times. Maybe you weren’t interested in hearing from Him. Maybe you didn’t care about His presence.

Oh, friends, that’s a far cry from the joy and delight we were created to feel when our Heavenly Father is near—which is always!

The Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Oh, we know we’re supposed to glorify God. But enjoy Him? We don’t think about that.

If we forget that we’re supposed to enjoy God, we develop a relationship with Him marked by long stretches of joyless obedience, punctuated with brief moments of spiritual excitement, the results of retreats, or summer camps, or maybe a particularly moving sermon.

Should we obey God without question? Absolutely. He is Almighty God, and He deserves nothing less than our immediate, unquestioning obedience. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy Him.

God is not only perfectly holy, righteous, and powerful, He is also perfectly loving, compassionate, and beautiful. We can enjoy a God like that. We can, and we must. And we will if we mediate on His attributes, immersing ourselves in contemplation of Him in all of His beauty and goodness.

It’s easy to think that if God would just show up at our homes, as I show up at the Y for Lindsey, of course we would respond in loving worship.

But friends, He already has shown up. We don’t see Him in visible form, but we know that if we have asked Him to save us, and acknowledged Him as our Lord and Savior, He lives in our hearts.

In our hearts.

That means He’s with us constantly. We don’t have to wait for Him to show up to pick us up. He is already with us, every moment of every day of our lives.

Yet instead of letting this motivate our hearts to respond in joyful delight to Him, we let it cause us to take Him for granted.

Yes, He’s here. We know that, and we become so used to that fact that sometimes, it doesn’t mean all that much to us anymore. We acknowledge with our heads that it is important, but it no longer moves our hearts.

There’s something very wrong with that. If the God of the Universe inhabits your heart, and you don’t regularly and consistently delight in His presence, there’s something very wrong with that.

Delighting in God’s presence won’t look the same for all people. If you are a person who tends not to be very emotional, then delighting in God’s presence will probably look different for you than for someone who is a very emotional person. And that’s fine.

What’s not fine is for you to fail to delight in Him.

Do you need to ask God to cause your heart to delight in Him? Before you do that, do you need to ask His forgiveness for taking Him for granted, for failing to appreciate His wondrous nature?

Think about how you feel when your child delights in your presence. Don’t you want to know that you bring the same kind of delight to God’s heart by delighting in Him?

After all, He delights in you.

Psalm 35:9—My soul will rejoice in the LORD.

Zephaniah 3:17—He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.

Derailed

Megan Breedlove October 13, 2008 0 Comments

My son Kenny loves trains.

The real ones that go by on the tracks not far from our house, blowing their horns and towing a hundred cars behind five engines? Loves ’em.

Those Brio-compatible ones that he can string together, build tracks for, and have hours of fun with? Loves them too.

Household objects that aren’t even real trains but can be placed one behind the other and pushed across the table to make pretend ones? Yep; loves ’em.

Kenny also loves to have people “play trains” with him, as he put it when he was three. “Mommy? Play trains with Kenny?” he would invite hopefully, his big brown eyes fastened on me as he awaits my answer.

“I’d love to, Kenny,” I usually said.

“Okay,” he would say delightedly, and sit down on the floor with the trains. Sometimes, he had a track already laid out; sometimes, we built one together.

We were doing just that a few months ago. Kenny had several sections of track laid out and hooked together. He also had about eight engines and train cars strung one behind the other (his attach with magnets), and two houses perched across the train tracks so that the trains could pass through the doors of the houses. We were having a good time moving his trains around the track and making train noises.

Sometimes, the beginning of the train was too far away from me for me to reach conveniently, so I would attempt to push the train from behind. There are grooves in the tracks, so I figured that should work.

Some of you already know what I’m going to say because you’ve had the experience: it didn’t work. While pulling a train works just fine, with all the other cars trailing neatly along behind, pushing a train causes some of the cars in the middle to derail. What you end up with is a car or two at the beginning and end still on the track, with everything in the middle in various stages of derailment.

Wow. What a metaphor for how things work in life, isn’t it?

When you do things the way they’re designed to be done (pulling the train), things work out just fine. When you try to force something to operate in a way it was never meant to work (pushing the train), much of it derails.

We know this. We know that some things in life have to be done a certain way if we want to experience success. So why, knowing this, do we push the train instead of pull it?

Sometimes, it would inconvenience us to do things the necessary way. Just as it would have inconvenienced me to have to reach for the front of the train to pull it, sometimes we will be inconvenienced when trying to do the right thing the right way. So we take a shortcut, hoping it will work and save us the extra effort.

Maybe we’re rebelling against having to do things a certain way. We’ve all been there—trying to do things our own way because we simply don’t want to do them someone else’s (God’s?) way.

There could be a thousand other reasons why we try to do things the easy way, even though we know we probably shouldn’t. Maybe, like me, we do things the wrong way (that day wasn’t the first time I had tried to push the train) because we’re hoping we can make it work out right this time so that we can avoid the consequences we’ve gotten every other time.

Sometimes, it’s not a big deal if we try to take a shortcut and it fails. Often, we can simply try again, the way we should have tried the first time, and things work out right, with no harm done. But let’s think about some times when there is harm done—when it does hurt us to try to take shortcuts.

The first one that comes to mind is in our relationship with God. As Christians, we all want to be close to God—or at least we say we do. Yet we act as if we can accomplish an intimate relationship with him by simply going to church and saying the right things—never mind the fact that we don’t study our own Bibles regularly and don’t pray regularly except maybe at mealtimes.

How about our relationship with our husband? Do we do things the right way, giving 100% effort, hoping to grow our marriage that way? Or do we try to take a shortcut—that is, try to effect change by nagging our spouse (which really isn’t a shortcut, because it doesn’t usually work, anyway)?

What about our relationship with our kids? Do we try to take the shortcut to winning our child’s heart of signing them up for classes they want, buying them what they want at Christmas, and sending the most creative, homemade Valentines with them to school for them to give their friends at the party, and believe that that’s sufficient? Or do we put our life’s effort into knowing them—connecting with their precious little spirits?

You know what? I’m glad God doesn’t take shortcuts. In fact, in order to establish an intimate relationship with us, God took the most “long cut” that there was: he became human and came to earth to live with us, eventually being crucified by us on a cross. He couldn’t have put forth any more effort than he did.

So the least we can do is do the same. In other words, as we go through this life he has given us, the least we can do is put all our effort into doing it “right”. I’m not talking about being a perfectionist or about never making mistakes. I’m talking about living life to the best of our ability—not half-heartedly, but wholeheartedly; not taking the easy way out, but putting forth the effort it takes; not skimping on the only thing that really matters (our relationship with God) in order to pursue temporary things that will fade away.

Is there an area in life where you are “pushing the train”? Do you need to start pulling? Ask God to show you. I guarantee that he will.

Proverbs 13:4—The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.

Motive

Megan Breedlove October 6, 2008 0 Comments

My three older kids are all at the age where they can get around pretty easily without help. Ellie, I rarely offer help to, because she rarely needs it. Kenny and Lindsey, though, need help more often—or at least that’s the way it looks to me.

Apparently, I’m sadly mistaken.

Help them down out of the van? No way. They can get down themselves, thank you very much. Offer to help them put on their shoes? What could I have been thinking? Put the toothpaste on the toothbrush myself instead of letting them do it? You should hear the affronted wailing.

Every now and then, however, even they acknowledge that they need help. When they are climbing into or out of the tub, I usually grip their arm firmly to help steady them, because you know how it goes when wet kid steps on wet floor. This kind of touch, they don’t mind.

But the same touch, given for a different reason, causes screaming and crying.

I’m talking about when, for disciplinary purposes, I have to firmly grasp their arm to get their attention, or to lead them away from something—or toward a punishment. In these instances, the minute I grasp their arm, they either tense up and try to twist away, or they start crying with the wails of someone who knows they’ve just lost a battle.

So what’s the difference?

Motive.

Both times, it’s the same touch—a firm grip on their arm. Their reaction to my touch all depends on the motive they think I have.

If they think I am trying to help them, they welcome my touch and not only cooperate with it but rely on it to achieve their goal. If they think I’m doing or about to do something they don’t like, they fight it.

Don’t we do the same thing to God?

If we think he is trying to help us—trying to do something we appreciate—we welcome his involvement in our lives. If we think he is trying to impose consequences or force us to do something we don’t want to do, we fight him.

On the one hand, we perceive his motive as positive toward us—offering us something we appreciate. On the other hand, we perceive his motive as negative—doing something bad to us.

What we need to realize is the same thing my children need to realize: in both cases, the motive is actually the same, and in both cases, it is for our benefit.

What? How can we say that his motive is equally loving toward us when he brings us an unexpected financial windfall and when he brings consequences for our sin?

Here’s how: God always acts in love toward us. Sometimes, he chooses to give us pleasant gifts out of his love for us and for his glory. Sometimes, his love requires him to discipline us in order to help mold us into the likeness of his son, an eminently loving thing to do.

No matter the specifics of how God is involving himself in your life, you can be sure that his motive toward you is love. He doesn’t sometimes grasp your arm to help you and sometimes to capriciously harm you. No, whenever he touches you, it is always with your greatest good and his greatest glory—two sides of the same coin—in mind.

It’s not likely that if Kenny sinned, and I had to grab his arm, Kenny would think, “Mom is only doing this for my good. I won’t cry or scream, because I trust Mom enough to know that even now, her response is going to be in my best interests.”

But dear mommy friend, do you know something? We can respond to God that way. We can choose to trust, knowing in our head and in our heart that God loves us profoundly and acts only out of love.

Always? Yes, always, dear friend. Because God is love. It’s not within his character to ever act in an unloving manner toward those he loves.

So even when you don’t understand what he’s doing…when you don’t know why he’s doing it…when you can’t see past the tears, or when you’re afraid…you can trust his heart toward you.

He loves you.

Always.

Psalm 117:2—For great is his love toward us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.