Parents, you’re only human

And it was very good 

Being a good parent would be easier if we weren’t human. We can’t quite master ourselves, our homes, the wills of the people who are dependent on us. We are at the mercy of forces beyond. We can’t guarantee outcomes. Our plans are thwarted. Life often demands what we don’t have at hand to give. Our imagination for good parenting outruns our capacity to do it.

Even before sin, our first parents did not have the kind of mastery we aspire to. They were creatures held in time and space. In perfection, there was work to do and boundaries on their existence. Adam and Eve had to learn to cultivate materials. They didn’t share God’s ability to speak things into being. They had to go one step at a time through processes, in a world designed to grow and change, cell by cell. Sinless Adam and Eve were not limitless Adam and Eve. Even in perfection, they were dependent on their Creator. And it was very good. 

There are some limitations we are frustrated by which are very good for us. We can only ever be one person, in one place, at one time. Each swing of the pendulum is lived one tick at a time (my favourite educational philosopher, Charlotte Mason, uses this metaphor). Restraint is built in. We’re meant to learn the goodness of it, instead of wishing it away. God has made it so. Like all he has made, there is something in it that delights him and can delight us too. 

If our idea of good parenting requires us to have the infinitude of God, then we’ve got the wrong idea. Good parenting fits within the boundaries of being a human confined in time and space. If we want a kind of parenthood that wouldn’t have been possible even before the Fall, then we’ve got adjustments to make. 

A new breed of limitations

We know Adam and Eve grasped after god-ness, reaching beyond the good restraints God had ordained. This brought a new, insipid breed of limitations. Death and decay began working against every cell, infecting all that is seen and unseen. These are the limitations we are allowed to call bad. The groaning of creation causes us grief. You can read about all that in Genesis 3.

Sickness, injury and decay mean we don’t always have bodies fit for all the tasks before us. Birthing and raising children is painful and dangerous. We are toiling on earth we will eventually rot in. In marriage, sweet productive intimacy is distorted by antagonism. The created world we were commissioned to rule is thorny. We are left to do work in God’s world without the satisfaction of walking in the Garden with him. We are working out how to be good mothers and fathers on a planet which is working against us,  in bodies cursed with mortality. 

The future also stands against us. We can’t be sure of outcomes. It would be so much easier to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into good parenting if we knew it was going to end well (in the same way that I can never quite enjoy a long-distance journey until we’re safely home). The blackest, most debilitating seasons I have had in mothering have been shrouded in the fear of what hasn’t happened yet. The appalling fear that any of my children could be dead within hours, from some unseen threat. And if they survive long enough, they might grow up to resent me for whatever I did or failed to do as a mother. Left untended, this bundle of thoughts and feelings is a sure way to quench good parenting, and any enjoyment of it along the way.

Fear on every page

Fear comes as we are confronted with the edges of our power,  our creaturely dependence on our Creator. We try to soothe fear with poor choices—choices that aren’t good for us, our spouses and our children. Fear handled poorly wrecks the goodness and the happiness we could be growing into as parents. Fear mishandled strangles the very things we’re scared to lose. The fear of things outside exposes the frightening limitations within.

We are all born spiritually dead in our sins. It is the ultimate limitation. We are not struggling as good people in a bad world. Left to ourselves, we are people who are so dead we can’t recognise what good is, or the God who made it. We are not just victims of the problem, we are part of it. Our sin soils even the best of our attempts at good. A moment of motherly kindness falls into a shadow cast by much worse. We cannot get to good parenthood without Jesus dealing with our sinful nature. Mercifully, he does. More than that, his resurrection is the flagship to the great undoing of death. The insipid limitations brought by the Fall will not last.

In the Bible, fear shows up on every page, and yet, it’s the most joyful book in the world. Fear is God’s gift which reminds us we are not safe away from him. At the foothills of every glorious landmark in redemptive history, people were afraid. Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets, Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, Jesus himself. Peter, Paul and John all had encounters with the Lord Jesus which left them near dead with fear. This fear wasn’t the sign of something going wrong, but of human limits (and sin) in the face of the gloriously limitless God who was making things right. 

As we face all the limitations we grind against as parents, whether our creaturely dependence or sin, as we feel the fear of all we cannot master, there is one Thing To Do. We need to be on our face before the God of the Universe. The God who, though he transcends all limits, came near in Jesus Christ. The God who stays near by his Holy Spirit. Good parenthood grows in that low, limited, afraid place, lifted only by him. We’re not meant to graduate from our knees. The everyday piety we need to raise children for God is done close to the floor. Limitations, and the fears which follow, are God’s merciful tools to get us there.

Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need (Hebrews 4:16). 

A version of this article, 'Good motherhood is limited and afraid', originally appeared at ‘Light Duties’.
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Cathy McKay lives in regional NSW with her husband and their six children, whom she homeschools. She believes that deeper convictions make better mums with lighter hearts. That’s why she started writing at Light Duties, where she works through God’s word, scouting out the features of faithful Christian motherhood.

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