When we had been married three years, we moved as far away from home as we thought we could get away with. We had about $20,000 in school loan debt and high hopes for an exciting life. We might not be great planners, but we are halfway decent adventurers. We wondered why in the world a body would choose to stay in one place for their whole life when our toes curled the precipice of the unknown.
It turns out that free babysitting is the reason a body would stay.
After we’d had a few kids of our own and finally paid off the school debt, we began to wonder if we just liked making things hard on ourselves. Gluttons for punishment. Even the hardiest of adventurers wants to take a shower, a break, eat a real meal, sleep on a real bed once in awhile. I was ready to admit we didn’t have it in us: maybe it was time to head back home or at least within an hour of my mom and her home cooking.
Babies that never, ever sleep and husbands that always, always work are a recipe for tired and cranky moms. I would whine and he would stand there frustrated, saying, “Just tell me what you want me to do!” But I didn’t know. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing I could do. You somehow think being debt free is the pinnacle of life…and then you have kids.
Talk about taking on debt! Time, money, sleep, energy–you pour it into them and fall into bed convinced you are ruining them.
I swear, I nearly went crazy. We thought our oldest boy had Asperger’s and didn’t dare leave him with another adult for more than a few minutes. My dad told me I needed to spank him more, my mother-in-law thought there was absolutely nothing wrong with any of her perfect grandchildren. Advice streamed in from a thousand miles away but no one could help us. It was me and Joe, Joe and Pearl. Stubborn. Clueless. Frustrated with one another. We were overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of independence, the freedom to make a thousand bad choices and only rely on one another to break our fall.
I’m glad for a hundred reasons that my kids are growing up, that I’ve been able to stay at home, to have the privilege of putting them to bed pretty much every single night of their existence. But boy, do they ever suck it out of you. When Jubal would scrounge around the house at 3 in the morning because he wasn’t tired, when Luke made me rock him and sing “Nothing But the Blood of Jesus” every evening for two hours straight, his sweaty face pressed to my shoulder. When FC had that bad habit of rolling up bits of trash and tossing it into my oven unnoticed (“I cooking!” he’d protest indignantly when we finally caught him in the act) and Gretty had eye goop for an entire year. Hospital and doctor visits, errands, school and grocery store adventures–each time, dragging every single kid with me. The boys have broken an examination table at the doctor’s office, a baby-changing table at Walmart, a seatback at a fast food restaurant. They turned the chore of putting dishes away into a game of throwing them off the back deck to see them roll down the mountain. Instead of racing matchbox cars, I’ve found them smashing them to bits with my set of free weights in the basement. Desperate in the winter to relieve our cabin fever, we played at the park in three feet of snow and 50-mile-an-hour winds. Stitches and broken bones but never a break from the neediness. We only had our little, immediate family supported by one hardworking, undervalued daddy.
It really does feel like I looked up one day and suddenly I had neck wrinkles and coffee-stained teeth, and perhaps the beginning of an ever-so-innocuous chin wart. I can’t so much say I’ve come out this side a victor as I can say every day behind me has been worth its struggle.
There are millions of other folks out there living my same story, I know that. Nobody really ever mentions it, but millions of people are falling into bed each night wondering if they are also ruining their kids lives, or if their kids are perhaps ruining theirs. Is this what our family is supposed to look like, smashing cars in the basement and escaping the house once in awhile so we don’t lose our minds? Is this really how life works? Will I ever understand my husband? Will he ever really understand me?
I was listening to Dr. McGee (my favorite Bible teacher, you can access his studies here) yesterday morning as he was covering Hebrews 11. It reminded me of the beginning of our own big adventure from thirteen years ago–he was discussing Abraham and the choices the man had to make in leaving his relatives behind in Ur to begin a journey on his own:
“God said to him, ‘Abraham, I’m going to do all these things I promised, and I’m gonna give you a son.’
Abraham and Sarah are gonna have a son. Now, that’s what is gonna make the home. They’re gonna have a son. And, first of all, may I say that you have here the basis of what would be in that day a godly home. The kind of home God wants young people to have, and we call it today a Christian home. These things are germane and they are basic. Now, God didn’t give them a course or send them to a preacher for counseling. Frankly, we preachers have done too much counseling, telling young people how they ought to do it. The thing is that we have been idealistic. God was very practical. He said, “Abraham, if you’re going to have the kind of home I want you to have, you’re going to have to get away from papa and mama.”
And that’s what God meant at the very beginning when He said (and of all things!), He said to Adam and Eve, “man will have to leave father and mother.” Adam and Eve didn’t even have a father and a mother! But He said ‘you’re going to have to leave’. That is a great principle that’s put down. And you know, the easiest thing in the world to do, and I’ve been learning it myself, is, I never thought that I would be a grandfather that would tell the parents how to raise their child–I didn’t do so well myself, but I sure can tell them! Well, they’ll make mistakes, but that’s none of our business. They’re going to have to make their mistakes, too, because we made ours. And papa and mama {are} not to interfere with the home of the children. And God got Abraham about as far away from home as you could go! And none of the relatives are going to be able to interfere. I think that is primary to the building of a godly home. To begin with, for Abraham, it was a godless home that he left! Because it was a home of idolatry.
….the home will never be an ‘ideal’ home…may I say something to you, friends, young person today? If you think you are going to start an ideal home, I think you’re wrong. You’re going to find out you are going to be tested!
…If you think, somehow or another, that putting up a few little rules that you’re going to avoid all of the rough places and the hardships of life, you’re wrong. You’re going to find out that one day you’ll argue with your wife. You’re going to find out one day you’re going to have a problem with that child that you’ve got. You’re not going to have a thing that’s ideal by any means! And how are you going to handle all of these, my friends? By faith. By faith! And when you and I reach the place that we’re willing to put our child on the altar for God, then you and I’ve arrived.
Here is a home that is just about as near to what God wants down here as you and I will be able to attain.”
Thru The Bible, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, Hebrews 11:8-19
It turns out that free babysitting is overrated! The biggest risk, the greatest adventure, the inevitability of little boys making thousands of terrible judgment calls point to one thing: faith forming a happy home. The marital disagreements, the intentional space separating us from our own parents, the ruckus of kids and sleepless nights–it made us grouchy for a few minutes, yes. We didn’t have any help to fall back on, nothing but the faith God supplied us, the encouragement to “not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9). But now, as the fog continues to clear and we sleep at night again, we can see: the life sown in faith is reaping a life filled with joy. We are reliant on God’s very own strength–not date nights, counseling, or a grandma’s cookie jar (though these might all be wonderful things). We are holding out for God’s best, willing to release what we thought was our adventure for what was really His–bigger, better, grander–all along.
By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.
All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country–a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
Hebrews 11:8-16
