The house is quiet except for the dull and distant noise from the boys’ sound machines and the sound of a cricket outside the sliding door behind me. I sit again at our kitchen table, a new (to us) table and matching chairs, more comfortable than the last chairs I mentioned. My youngest son is visible on the monitor and I can see him stirring. He’s entered his third round of teething and has been feeling out of it the last couple of days.
My oldest, who I heard hitting his legs against the crib just a bit ago, has been making substantial progress in potty training. We have far more successes than failures at this point and our main struggle now is to get him to acknowledge when he needs to go, instead of relying on ourselves to catch sight of his face when he can no longer delay the inevitable.
The road to this point has not been an easy one, let’s be clear. About a month-and-a-half ago, I was sitting, much as I am now, at our table on a Saturday morning attempting to read my Bible. My younger son woke up very early, before six, if I remember right, and wouldn’t settle down. He was hungry because we’d dropped his last night feeding not too long before and he was teething; so, as you can imagine, he was a grump. As his cries wrent the peaceful atmosphere, I heard other more cheerful cries from my older son.
It’s not unusual for my oldest, a passionate fellow, to wake up early and hoop and holler, sing (i.e., yell the words to songs; imagine Buddy the Elf singing in Gimbels), and generally spend the greater part of the energy he gained through sleep in as noisy a fashion as possible. That being so, I didn’t think anything of his antics.
A short time later, I’d gotten my younger son up and passed him off to Jen for breakfast while I went to get the morning entertainer. You need to know some context to understand what happened next. As we started potty training our oldest and he started wearing underwear instead of a diaper for the majority of the day, he got the idea that he must never need a diaper. I’m not sure if he genuinely believed that the diaper was unnecessary or if he was just over it since new options had presented themselves.
I opened the door to his room and immediately smelled the fruits of his overnight labor. I told him good morning and opened the blinds. He said something about his diaper being off, so I glanced at his sleep sack and could tell that, yes, he’d removed the diaper. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal but the smell assaulting my nose concerned me. I unzipped the sleep sack and, sure enough, the not-just-liquid contents of the diaper were all over the inside of the sleep sack and, as you can imagine, that meant said contents were also over a good portion of my son’s lower half. Let’s just say, it was quite the Saturday morning in the Adams household.
While that’s a fairly uncommon scenario, times like that get me thinking about the package deals we get as parents. Yes, I sometimes have to clean excrement off of my son’s legs and clothing, but I also get to see his excitement and joy at receiving a bike helmet. I get to hear his little voice sing the doxology each night before bed and ask us to sing, “how many persons are there in the God-face” (a catechism song which, clearly, he’s still learning). I get to see my younger son’s face light up when his brother walks in the room, or when I get home from work. I get to watch him practice his new skills, like nodding and waving, every time he remembers his new abilities, and I get to hear him yell along as we sing before bed.
Both sets of behaviors, represented by poopy legs and head/face confusion, are signs of immaturity. God, in His kindness, designed many of those immaturities to be cute and inspire feelings of love in parents but they’re still signs of immaturity. It’s easy for me to forget the extent to which these children need someone to guide them as they go from knowing nothing but how to eat to adults, ready to parent children of their own. God gave me and my wife to these two boys and, hopefully, other future children to train them and teach them how to live godly lives. Godly children are, after all, one of the fruits intended by God to come from marriage (see Malachi 2:15). God intends for me and my wife to train our children, to teach them to be mature, godly adults who are a resource and asset to their families, churches, and communities.
I often think, when I see my sons doing little things that make sense to them although they wouldn’t to an adult, that they’ll figure it out later. While that’s true with most of the small things I see now, I’m reminded that the ultimate responsibility for their training and mentorship lies with me. I can’t trust that someone else will take care of teaching them something or that, if they do figure it out on their own, they’ll be able to do it biblically. Especially in the latter case, why would I not be diligent to share with them my experience and knowledge as informed by Scripture? Even if they ignore it initially, they will have it in their memory to fall back on in the future.
I’ve also been struck lately by how much American life has changed, even in my short memory. Funnily enough, it was a very short scene in the movie You’ve Got Mail that reminded me of this. The scene that struck me is just a group of people gathered around a piano at Christmas time singing together as they sipped drinks and laughed. Now, I was two when that movie was released, and I realize that not all families and friends in the 90’s were gathering like that for the Christmas season. But it seems the experience was normative enough (or there was at least enough of a cultural memory of that experience as a positive thing) that it made its way into a mainstream film; a memory of people knitted together in communities, families spending important times of year together and, if someone didn’t have family close, friends that would include them.
I began to think about my own childhood and review what my wife told me about hers in the context of that culture, where people would get together for a holiday like Christmas and talk and laugh and sing together. I remember a little of this but not enough of it to be a part of my family culture. My wife’s family did a better job, I think, at practicing those types of cultural preservation. I’ve recently realized that small things like getting together with your family and friends to do something as simple as drink good drinks and sing good songs are just that: acts of cultural preservation. It provides, also, a context in and foundation on which further culture can be built.
My children were born into a different nation than I was; a post-iPhone, post-Obergefell, post-COVID America. But they will also grow up in a post-people-recognizing-the-dangers-of-technology, post-Roe-overturned, post-Christians-actually-thinking-through-their-relationship-to-the-government America; an America that’s beginning to see a revelation of the fruit of a lot of bad theology (and, therefore, practice) that’s been going around for a while now and where a lot of Christians are turning to a more historical, robust, and, most importantly, biblical theology. I’m hopeful for my kids. But mingled with that hope is a weight of responsibility to teach them to be thoroughly Christian people, who look around and see God’s fingerprints on every creature and sunset and mountain pine, who laugh from deep in their bellies and weep from deep in their chests, who can just as easily gather around a piano to sing “Joy to the World” with family and friends as they can weep with their fellow church member who lost a loved one. That means I have to be that kind of person. I certainly don’t feel there yet; far, far from it. Much less am I ready to teach someone else to be that kind of person.
But that seems to be part of the process through which God likes to work. In my experience, He doesn’t have me figure something out and then sit down and transfer that knowledge to someone else; part of the process of learning is modeling it. As I model it, I understand it; not the other way around. When it comes to Christianity, there seem to be a lot of things that we have to do before we fully understand them. I often want it to be the other way around: I want to understand, then I’ll obey. But that’s not the way of a disciple. A disciple lives with their teacher and mimics them because they recognize that, whether they understand it yet or not, the fruit they see in this person is a result of their lifestyle. Even if we understand something theoretically and start to practice it as a result, we keep doing it because of the understanding we’ve gained from that practice.
I’ve noticed this applies to maturity and responsibility. My wife and I have recently been dealing with a mouse problem. One morning during this struggle between man and mouse, I was sitting at our kitchen table and could hear one scratching around somewhere. I had seen one go behind our oven and that’s the area of the kitchen from where the sounds were coming. Each time I heard something, I’d look to see where it went but almost an hour went by with occasional scratching and scampering noises but no sign of a mouse.
Then, I heard an obnoxious amount of scratching. I looked up just in time to see a mouse squeeze out the top of our toaster, jump down to the counter, and scamper behind the stove.
I was horrified. I began to feel tempted to bemoan the situation (not to mention to find a sledgehammer with which to dispose of the toaster), feeling sorry for myself that this was one more thing on my plate in the midst of a very busy couple of weeks. I was reminded, however, that I’d been praying, like someone who wasn’t thinking clearly, for maturity and opportunities to repent of what I believe was a lack of my taking responsibility for the state of our home. I’d also been dreaming big, laying out with my wife a vision for our family and a plan to achieve it, as well as asking God to confirm and bless it. Lo, here was such an opportunity, a two-for-one deal; an opportunity for me to manage the situation by taking responsibility for the state of my household and for me to learn some of the management skills (of time, money, and property) that will be necessary if I’m going to achieve that family vision. The stress of a mouse problem during an already busy couple of weeks is God moving me up in weight. I’ll admit that, when I prayed that prayer mentioned above, I’d thought the opportunity would look different. Mice were not on the list of things I’d expected. But I realized that this, along with cleaning poopy legs, wiping snotty noses, potty training little ones, and all of the other less-than-glamorous tasks that come with parenting young children, is part of both my teaching and training.
“So, you want to be the kind of man that handles stress well, eh? Want to set a good example by being patient and kind even when everything needs to be done at once? You want to keep your cool when one more thing gets added to an already-too-long list? You got it. One order of great writing opportunities, pests, appliance replacement, birthday celebrations, and, just for good measure, a sleep regression for your child coming right up…What? I thought you wanted to be strong. You can’t be strong without lifting the weight, kid.”
As I think about the future, I think hopefully, of myself building something lasting that will provide for my children, at least in part, and of my being capable of handling the various responsibilities associated with a productive Christian household. Of course, it’s nice to think about future me, older and wiser, capably handling those responsibilities without batting an eye. But the part I don’t dwell on is the years of emotional, spiritual, and physical weight lifting it takes to get there. If I want to be a capable patriarch in my family, I’ve got to go through some difficult times to develop into that man.
Now, my current difficulties are not unique or really that difficult in the grand scheme of things. They feel difficult, though, which is just a testament to my weakness. Thankfully, I’m being cared for and trained by a God who loves me and is gentle but firm when it comes to growth, a God who gives me all I need to handle these situations when it feels like there’s just not enough time or patience for all of the things that need to be done. He is good and will see the work He’s begun to its end. All for His glory and the good of His people.
To whom it may concern, the mouse and the toaster ended up together in the end. They now share a casket, courtesy of the Oklahoma Environmental Management Authority.