I’ve spent much of the last two weeks gazing into the face of my infant son Josiah. It is an awesome and fearful thing (in the old sense of both words) to become a father and to hold your son in your arms.
Josiah loves his daddy
I had been told by many fathers that they inexplicably loved their children from the moment they lay eyes on them. That certainly held true for me, though I believe the love kicked in quite a bit before I saw him. I vividly remember being overwhelmed with love for my unborn child the first time I felt him kick Caryn’s womb.
I look at him and wonder at the love I feel for him. Where did it come from? Why do I love him so much? He has never done anything for me, and at this point I can’t imagine that he ever will. This is like nothing I have ever felt before. Why do I love him? No answer satisfies, except “because he is my son and I am his father.”
I am his father, and it is right that I should love him unconditionally. It would be wicked to fail to love.
Imagine if I did not love him! You would rightly call me a monster, an unfeeling wretch. How could a father not love his own child? This law seems written into the human soul – “fathers, love your children.” Even in a morally desensitized society we cringe at stories of parents who fail to love their children, who neglect or abuse, who shame, who murder.
A frantic thought passes through my mind as I gaze at Josiah. What if he doesn’t love me in return? I can’t imagine a worse end than that. Unrequited love between a man and a woman is painful indeed, but between a father and his child? How could a child not love the one who sired him? How could he reject the parents who conceived him, bore him, nursed him, fed him, cleaned him, raised him, trained him, gave him everything they possessed out of pure love?
That a child might reject and hate his loving father is a monstrous crime to imagine. Again, this law seems written in our souls: “children, honor your father and your mother.” We cringe at stories of children who reject and hate their loving parents. As we’ve grown in Christ, many of us have discovered the need to repent of little rebellions and hatreds in our hearts towards our parents, and to seek restoration. When I think of my own earthly father, I find this to be true:
I am his son, and it is right that I should love him in return. It would be wicked to fail to love.
Which brings me around to God the Father, revealed by Jesus to be his own eternal father and ours by adoption:
Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
[John 1:12]
For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba [Daddy], Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.
[Romans 8:15-16]
By nature of our being creations of God, we certainly owe him both obedience and love. After all, he created us and gave us everything that is good! But something even greater has been revealed to us by Jesus Christ – God the Father adopts those who are in Christ to be his own sons and daughters.
God is not a distant uninvolved watchmaker who set the universe spinning and then stepped back. He is a father, The Father, who is intimately involved in creation, and especially in the lives of those he has adopted into his own family.
Our Father loves us not because of anything we can do for him, but because we are his children. He loves us because we are his! That is a great comfort as we struggle through this life, limping along towards God, and wrestling with our sinful tendency towards rebellion.
Our clear duty as dearly loved children is to love and obey our heavenly Father in return. This truth is written into the hearts of all human beings – we are made to know and to love our creator God. For those who have been joined to Jesus Christ and thus adopted as children of Father God, we know this truth to run even deeper, for we relate to him as dearly loved children.
God loves us because he is our Father and we are his children. We love him in return as a child loves his parents, because he first loved us. God wove this magic into the fabric of the universe, and the fabric of human fatherhood, at the dawn of time. And he saw it, and it was very good.
Now don’t get me wrong, I was never one of those guys who say they don’t want to have kids. No sir. From the time it became a pertinent question (namely engagement to marriage), I was firmly in the five-years-from-now camp.
As soon as I knew he was a boy, I knew I would give him the middle name of Randolph: a family name and my middle name. In addition to “Wolf Shield” it’s also variously rendered as “Wolf Counselor” or “House Wolf.” The idea is a fierce, half-wild but loyal guardian. If you’ve read White Fang and remember how he protected the human family that adopted him at the end of the book, you can grasp a good idea of what the name suggests to me.
While there were some parts of the class that came from a perspective we don’t agree with (Darwinian just-so stories, mainly), overall it was helpful and enjoyable. We drew a labyrinth and talked through how this (like many life experiences) can be visualized in a labyrinth — predicting there will be stretches of clear straight-aways, coming up to walls that stop us, hitting dead ends, coming close to the center and being thrown back out to an outer edge…and finally coming around to the main destination. It was nice to engage the visual aspect of our brains and discuss where we forsaw these parallels coming in. And then also having an experienced mother share some of her own insights on some places to expect these bumps and progresses.
The final thing I did was work with clay and express whatever…I created this piece. I could go into what it may mean, but as Sandra said, the clay just comes to life and speaks. I enjoyed this activity and engaging that part of my brain with this experience; it seems very important to such a large event in our life and especially in processing all the preparation, doubts, concerns, excitements for this life change!
Unlike my experience of touring Winnie Palmer, we were thrilled by our experience with the midwives at the Birth Place. Some major differences were that all the things that we would read in checklists in the spectrum of books — the midwife answered before we even had to ask. The assumptions are your natural preferences, and any intervention would only be done when necessary. The midwife, Robyn, who gave us the tour was very open to say that even that past weekend, a rare occurrence of a mother who was not progressing through transition, and had grown exhausted, was taken to the hospital safely and she ended up having her birth there. The birth center midwives are very open about their procedures and practices; as certified midwives, they are under the same requirements as the hospital when it comes to medical discipline and accountability. While they are not doctors, they are accountable to doctors, and to keep their licensure, which is something they’d want to do, they will not make dumb choices that will put the mother or child at risk. Like the doctors and hospitals, their goal is healthy mom, healthy baby.
