Babies are made for holding!

December 12, 2012

Well, at least that’s what my mother use to tell me when my babies were small. And believe me, now that my brand new grandson has been born, I’m thinking truer words were never spoken. Another thing, I might add, is that these grandmother’s arms are aching to hold her brand-new grandson.

As I write this blog, my daughter-in-laws parents and grandmother are in route back to their homes. I imagine my daughter-in-law might be struggling emotionally right about now so I pray God will comfort and strengthen her. It seems that having a baby plays havoc with the emotions of the mom. Once those particular hormones get stirred up during the whole pregnancy/birth thing, a woman is never the same.

Actually, she’s in a better state, in my opinion. For now she is sensitive to understanding her relationship to God in a way that up until that baby arrived, she was pretty much clueless about. I regret to say that I didn’t quite get that whole parent/child relationship as to how it was inter-connected with the relationship I had with my heavenly Father until my children were college age. And while I deeply regret it, my fiery dart’s training inspires me to move my thoughts to focus on the fact that I did finally get it and my love for my children and my heavenly Father has been the richer for it ever since.

There is so much that having children can reveal to you about your relationship with God. For I wonder, if after God created Adam & Eve, he might have asked Himself this question, “Now what can I create for this couple that would help them get a truer understanding of how I feel about them? I know, I will give them children.”

Yep, as any of you parents know, loving your children teaches you volumes about loving sacrificially. Loving those precious ones like you do puts you in touch with God’s kind of love. Father’s and Mother’s alike love from a vastly different perspective once that baby arrives. Now your heart lives outside your body and you will lovingly spend the rest of your life guarding and protecting your heart. No child ever outgrows that.

It’s unfathomable how my heart has expanded over the years to include 4 children and 9 grandchildren while my capacity to love each and every one never diminished. Isn’t it a wonder how the capability to love only increases with each child we are blessed to parent? It is a mystery from the heart of God that defies explanation! And yet, it does not require an explanation to understand it; for to experience it is to understand it.

As my son and daughter-in-law experience for the first time this sweetest of mysteries from God, my prayer is that early on they will make the connection between understanding the love God has for them as they love their own precious infant son. From this point on, may they always be open to hearing the tender parental voice of God as He reveals nuances of His love for them that has been fashioned out of the love a parent has for His child.