Me: Prodigal what a group you have there today!
Prodigal: Yes this is my friend Bubba and Bubba Jr., I have been talking about your stories and a couple of friends wanted to hear.
Me: Well the stories are from God and not me but I do not mind sharing them. In fact I have one that relates to parents so I could share that one today.
Prodigal: Perfect lets begin!
Philip Yancey begins by saying lets think back to the images from the Prophets: God as Parent and as Lover. Both those human relationships contain elements of what God has always been seeking from human beings. One Word, dependence, holds the key. The key to what they have in common and the key to how they differ.
For a baby, dependence is everything; someone else must meet its every need or the child will die. Parents stay up all night, clean up vomit, teach toilet training, and perform other unpleasant chores out of love because they sense the child’s dependence. But such a pattern cannot continue forever. An eagle stirs the nest to force its eaglets to fly; a mother covers her breast to wean her child.
No healthy parent wants a permanently dependent child on his hands. And so a father does not push his daughter around in a large carriage for life, but teaches her to walk, knowing that she may one day walk away. Good parents nudge their children from dependence toward freedom.
Lovers, however, reverse the pattern. A lover possesses complete freedom, yet chooses to give it away and become dependent. “Submit to one another.” says the Bible, and any couple can tell you that’s an apt description of the day-to-day process of getting along. In a healthy marriage, one submits to the other’s wishes voluntarily, out of love. In an unhealthy marriage, submission becomes part of a power struggle, a tug-of-war between competing egos.
The difference between those two relationships shows, I believe, what God has been seeking in his long history with the human race. He desires not the clinging, helpless love of a child who has no choice, but the mature, freely given love of a lover. He has been “romancing” us all along.
God never got such mature love from the nation Israel. The record shows God nudging the young nation toward maturity: on the day Israel advanced into the Promised Land, the manna ceased. God had provided a new land; now it was up to the Israelites to grow their own food. In a typically childish response, Israel promptly started worshiping fertility gods. God wanted a lover, he got a permanently stunted child.
This does not mean God wants a lover in a physical sense but it is talking about our emotional relationship with God and this gives a vivid picture in our mind what God is looking for. Maybe today your focus is about your own relationship with your children? Maybe the focus is about a love relationship and where it is going? Maybe it is about your relationship with God? Today where are we going? Are we standing still in stunted growth or are we moving forward to the Promise Land that God has given us?
Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature.”
1 Corinthians 14:20
Jennifer Van Allen,
www.faithincounseling.org
www.theprodigalpig.com
