You Can Rest; God Knows

My cousin has the cutest twin boys you can imagine! They have this really lovely skin colour being born by a white mother. But it doesn’t take five minutes before you know they are actually Bini Boma boys in white skin! You would be convinced that they actually see themselves as flying Carpets with no dangers of landing in any uncontrolled way. They practically flew from one end of the room to the other… they were masters of the roughest adventures. But that didn’t take their cuteness away, and since we were never around long enough to deal with the real ‘them’, it was very easy to drool over them for their cuteness. Whilst this was going on, the mum was struggling… they hadn’t spoken legibly, even at age 2+. Potty training didn’t seem like an option to them either, even at 2. They were not worried a bit!

At a point, the mum had to pay to engage a psychologist. She went with them for the visit with great expectations of psychological analysis. But to our disappointment, she came back with no serious prescriptions for any sort of therapy or the other. The psychologists simply explained that the motivation to communicate was not so high for them; they had and did understand each other. They were satisfied in their world. For potty training, the mum was asked to return with them by the time they are five if they are still not trained. That was certainly not what she expected!

But really, I could immediately relate to how many times I worried over my babies, would they talk? Would they walk? Would they be smart…? Another mother told me how she noticed her daughter had bow legs, and she would use hot water and a towel to massage the legs hoping that would solve it. The child grew up, and the legs straightened out! Nothing to do with that massage!

As parents, we go through several phases of our children’s lives with heart-in-mouth and an eventual deep sigh of relief when we are proven wrong, or it resolves. And then we move to the next one…and the next. Interestingly, not many of us remember to reflect on how God Himself resolved the last ones. One lady used to tease her mum by calling home and saying ‘mama what’s the latest problem?’ By the way, there was always one, and it was always about one child or the other! One mother once said, “Don’t you know that when you have 4 children, you have 4 problems?” She was referring to the several headaches she has had over each child’s journey at one point or the other.

Interestingly, it would appear that the life of parenting is that of aligning and re-aligning. The challenge shows up; it is tackled, God resolves it and then the deep sigh of relief.

There may not be any need to change the process, it must be reconsidered…

It is true that having four children implies four distinct responsibilities, but it is that of nurturing destinies that God already birthed and not necessarily dying and waking up at the several points of the journey due to the weight of carrying the responsibilities for their outcomes. That would be playing God. The call is to nurture and not to worry over the provisions for the destinies.

God is too responsible to not undertake for His children. Many times we are not intimate enough with the realities of God, as our father. Consider how far we, as parents, go to help our children succeed. If you as a parent, can love your children this much, what of God your ultimate parent? His love is pure and in no way comparable with the greatest love your heart can ever carry. Would He not sort things out? What can your son do to you that will make you take food from his mouth? Or make you let him suffer without care? How much more God!

The next time you get to that turn where by precedence you are ‘supposed’ to panic and begin to help God to make the solution faster. Or perhaps, it gets too tough, you need to act fast and there is “not enough time to engage with God, just consider…

“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” (Isaiah 49:15)

If you can grasp Him as a loving, dependable and all sufficient father that He really is, then the tempo would change as we surf in the ups and downs of parenting.