A meditation

Are parents teacher or students? My biggest concern when I learned I was going to become a parent was how to teach my coming child about God. I mean, how does the finite (and fallable and tired) communicate the nature of God to the mind of a child. Now that Niki is here, I find her teaching me about God in tiny finite moments.

Often in the Bible God presents Himself to us as our Father. We take this to mean that He is in authority over us, that He is our origin, that He provides for us, but think about everything else that a parent is, all the things that are difficult to put in words.

For instance, this morning, as I was changing Niki's diaper, I budged her head on the changing table in a way that was uncomfortable, and she looked at me with tears in her eyes and her mouth all smunched up, but when she saw my face and noticed that I was smiling and comforting, she decided to smile instead. She looked at me and decided that what she had thought was a bad thing was not so bad because I was smiling.

Think of the effect that a parent has on a child. More than teaching right and wrong, we teach them how to respond to the smallest things: scraped knees, bugs in the backyard, dirt, lace and ribbons, their own desires, habits, and traits. They take their mindsets from us. They look to us to learn how to respond to all the little stimuli in the world around them. So too we should look to God, letting His perspective or the look on His face determine how we respond to the stimuli in our world, especially the hard ones. If we look up and see God smiling, then we can be confident that whatever discomfort we are experiencing is part of a healthy process or done with a good purpose.