Parenting Page: Pursuit

This has been a rough year for Caroline, our 3 and a half year old. I was sick from March though August, Julia has started walking :), and now I am working full time. When school was the dominant part of my time I would often sacrifice an A for a B in order to make sure I got good time with my girls. With work it is entirely different, and I am simply gone from the house more (and I cannot do work at night in my basement like i could with school... I did make some A's in Seminary :) ).

So, when I go home today there is a good chance Caroline will say (in a half-yell), "No, Daddy (BURN-E/Fillmore the Bus/Terrence /Eric) go in the dining room..." Or, "Don't Come in". The only thing that has been harder as a parent (for me) is when she didn't want to talk with Rachel after Julia was born.

I have learned to pursue my daughter through this. She will almost always relent to being chased. I have to be careful to chase in such a way that she doesn't get to run directly to Mommy, but I can almost always convince her that chasing is good. Caroline is a sucker for being thrown up in the air. It is rare that she doesn't like it, or being swung around. Julia is a different story, she has her mother's issues with motion. But Julia also runs to me when I get home.

I am not a great pursuer in some relationships, but I do know how to pursue Caroline. When I was sick I would pray for the energy to chase her. Now I have it, and I so easily forget! It means so much to her heart when we do it. There are a lot of analogies there, about God, about parents, and about love. But, the purpose of this post is to simply encourage you to pursue your child this afternoon or evening. You were probably going to anyway. If you do not have children, pursue a good friend - call them, and begin with obvious excitement if you get them on the phone (this is adult chasing maybe?). Have a good Wednesday.

-Matt Blazer

Got

A few days ago, I watched this video clip that showed a conversation (of sorts) between individuals who follow Jesus and those who do not. The “roundtable discussion” was held to hear various voices across the broader culture interact with large, metaphysical questions. Interestingly, a passing comment callously directed towards the Christians was the notion that God sits on his throne and gets everyone who is evil. 

The reason this critique came was because what we all needed to do was to move away from mental categories of “good” and “evil,” and to see the world as having constructive and destructive forces. But what we must not do is assign moral value to these forces or to anything (be it winning the lottery, getting your car towed, or an event like 9/11). To do so, so the reasoning goes, is a sign of weakness—an inability to see the world as it is. Therefore, to need a God to come and punish evil is a crutch. 

There is much that I would like to interact with regarding these sentiments. I would love talk about the notion of moral ambiguity. I would love to talk about why, I think, Christianity gives a better answer to pain and suffering than functionally ignoring it. But what I want to interact with in the next few minutes is the way this line of thinking sees God as acting toward evil.

I hope I am being fair (I do not mean to malign) to the above perspective on reality in my thoughts below. However, one of the fundamental problems with this way of viewing God is that, perhaps, He (she or it?) remains indifferent except for when punishing needs to be doled out. Then, with a short fuse, he gets off his duff and starts punishing people. In other words, “God’s out to get you.” 

Now, in one sense, the Christian understanding of the way that God acts towards evil is quite interesting. It affirms that God himself, crushed his own Son, so that he will not “get” those who love and delight themselves in Him. Said differently, God “gets” his own Son, precisely so he will not “get” those who otherwise deserve to be “got.” 

There is another sense, too, in the way that Christianity understands God “getting.” Perhaps this slice-of-life will help. I recently was chatting with a friend of mine when his daughter saying, “Daddy, will you get me?”, interrupted us. She took off running and my friend followed closely behind, letting her get a few steps ahead. At last, her speed wasn’t enough and he scooped her up into his arms and planted a big, fat kiss right on her cheek. The little girl was beaming with excitement, enjoyment and laughter. She had been “got,” and it was a delightful thing.

For the Christian, the problem with thinking that God is out to "get us" fails to account for this sort of being “got.” It’s a getting of enjoyment; it is one of pursuit and delight. There is no reason remaining for there to be any sort of punishment whatsoever. Yes, God is out to get you, but you don’t know the half of what He is getting your for!

Lastly, I often wonder if our reasoning gets the best of us. Sometimes we fail to understand something (which is quite okay) and, then, based on this faulty understanding, we reject the (faulty) understanding by creating a reason to reject it. It’s like trying to build a house starting with the roof and, then, realizing that there is no place to put it, rule the roof out as useless. Then, the house is constructed without a roof and we are left wondering why we get wet when it rains. 

The truth of the first Good Friday (which Christians celebrate tomorrow) was that there was a double “getting” that day. Yes, God came after (read: punish) somebody for sure. But it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me. It was Jesus. And, for the reason they call it Good, God “got” somebody else too. But this second kind is “gotten” of delight—both in the “Getter” and the “gotten.” --Ryan