Children and White Carpet

This week I attended the funeral of a young man who died older than his chronological age. Andrew passed away just shy of his 22nd birthday after a 12 month battle with brain cancer. From everything I could observe, Andrew experienced a great deal of life - both the good and the bad - in that last year of dying. Being told you have a terminal illness tends to create "old souls" in young bodies.

Burying a child is one of the cruelest things that can happen to a parent or grandparent. It is an experience which will define the family until they no longer are a family. Like the anonymous poem says:  

Don’t tell me to be thankful for the time I had,
Because I wanted more.
Don’t tell me when I am my old self you will be glad,
I will never be as I was before.

Perhaps the only thing that compares to this type of cataclysmic family experience is when an adult child completely rejects his or her family. Those parents live life in a type of physic purgatory which brings repeated destruction of their feeble hopes. After a while it tends to wear you down. 

With potential heartbreak like this, how do we understand verses like Psalm 127:3,4? "Children are the heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from Him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth." If they are such a blessing, why do children hurt so much?

I think part of the answer is found in a snippet Jessica Lange (yes, that Jessica Lange) wrote. "When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children."   Children manage to make us less and more at the same time.

God uses our children to force us to admit our own helplessness and return to being dependent children ourselves. It doesn't matter how many James Dobson books you have read, your children have an innate way of humbling you and, yes, even forming the "who you are to be."

Children force us to do things we never would have done unless we were under the influence. I still get nauseated thinking about some of those amusement park rides I went on with the girls. Like Erma Bombeck said, "All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them."

In the end, our sons and daughters give us the ultimate example of who our Heavenly Father would have us be.. His children. He uses them and our experiences with them - both the bitter and the better - to form us into His image. So, through life and death with them, we are called to "...change and become like little children,.."