The Books We Would Not Choose

If before I was born, I was ushered into God’s Great Library of Lives to be Lived to select  the book of my life, I would never have picked the one I got. Who picks the book where their father becomes an abusive alcoholic and their oldest son battles cancer for three year and then dies at age nine? I would never have picked that book, yet that is the one the Lord handed me. And now thirteen years after the death of my oldest son Jacob, I can say it has been the best book in the world.

Without that book, I would never have known the depths of the good things God has planted in this fallen world. How would I have known that the things I counted loss were the tempering fires that would teach me what was truly good? Without those flaming hurts, I would never have seen the unexplainable courage of a little boy wracked with pain, yet staunchly loyal to his Jesus. I would never have felt the comfort of a Father who witnessed the same in his own Son yet did not decline to offer Him up as a ransom for many. And I could never have comprehended  the gratitude of a man who realizes he has not lost a child but has only sent him ahead.

Had I chosen the book, it would have been filled with nothing but the joys and happiness and plenty of this world. The truth is I do not know how to choose the best things for me and mine, and I would venture to say that most Christian parents don’t either. We would shower our children with joy and happiness and plenty and think we have chosen well. But we do not have God’s perspective. As C.S. Lewis puts it

… if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.

 

This is the problem . It is not that we want too much for our children but too little. We would have them be content with a good education, good jobs and comfort when God has set before them an epic mission to change the world. Granted, that mission is dangerous, arduous, and daunting. But isn’t that the  best kind?

Regretfully, most Christians have trained themselves and their children to love comfort and predictability over adventure and have become like Bilbo Baggins when he proclaims that his kind are “… plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them.”

Like Bilbo, we don’t see anything in the great adventure for us, let alone our children, and so this offer of Christ to an epic mission is the one book we would see shelved and unread. That, however, is the one thing we must not do. We must pull down that great story from the shelf and find the chapters of our Christian children, point them to their parts, and urge them into the tale. For it is true, as the writer of Ephesians declares, that they were “…created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for (them) to do”.

As parents and teachers, we need to urge our children and students into the great tale and down the road to adventure knowing  what Bilbo knew,  that “ It’s a dangerous business…going out of your door, … You step onto the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Who can tell, the Lord may hand our children  a book that changes the world. May they open and read.