24. Spiritual Maturity Means Spiritual Parenthood
24
Spiritual Maturity Means Spiritual Parenthood
It may seem to some readers that this treatment of human loneliness is only theoretical, perhaps merely passive, perhaps “too spiritual.” Where is the practical help?
I might suggest that you join a health club or the church choir or go on a cruise; take an evening class in poetry or underwater basketweaving; learn to sing, ski, sew, snorkel, or spelunk. If you’re looking for a husband, move to Alaska—that’s where the men are, they say. If it’s a wife you want, go to the foreign mission field. Single women greatly outnumber the men there (in Ecuador when I was there it was something like seventy to one).
But of course I am suggesting nothing along that line. It is a very different line that I offer, more practical, more “useful” in the long run than any diversion, one that has been for me not only eminently workable wherever I was, whatever the cause, but fundamentally transforming. It is not a trick or a program or a method of getting rid of loneliness altogether. I do not believe there is such a thing. It does not cost money, require skill, or depend upon the cooperation of others. It is this simple matter of seeing loneliness as a gift—to be received, and to be offered back to God for His use. We might say it is coin, exchangeable for something of everlasting value.
When a coin is spent, it’s gone. I have often found that loneliness given to God disappears. I cannot find it anywhere. My heart is light. My work is a joy. I am healed. And all unbeknownst to me, there has been, in addition to my own healing, an exchange I did not dream of: Someone else’s load has been lightened.
But then it comes again, in a different way, perhaps, but loneliness all the same—the reminder that I was made for God, my heart will never rest anywhere else, and nothing the world can offer will satisfy.
Can I promise that your loneliness will disappear at once? No. It does not always happen so. I cannot offer a wand which when waved in the proper way will make your troubles vanish. I cannot say, “This is what you can do about it,” but I can say, “This is what you can do with it—right now.” Receive it willingly as from God. Offer it thankfully back to God.
You will still be alone, but you will not be lonely. You will find solace in solitude, and your oblation brings you one step nearer to spiritual maturity.
But I want to go a step further. It is more than a step, I think. It is a door which is open to all of us—that of spiritual parenthood.
Physical maturity brings the power to reproduce. Spiritual maturity brings the same. I believe we are meant to be fathers and mothers. Not all of us in the usual physical way, for God’s original plan was botched. When we are redeemed, however, we become new creatures. Anything becomes possible. Although God has not yet created a new heaven and a new earth, He created us to be like Him “in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24 NIV), and He has not given up on that. He is in the business of making new men and women. Jesus died that we might no longer live for ourselves. He wants to live His life in us, and thus to make us Life-givers.
One of those wonderful nature programs on public television showed the marvelous story of the emperor penguin of the Antarctic. The males incubate the eggs. I will not soon forget the scene—acres and acres of ice, surrounded by the frigid sea and a nearly black sky; wind whistling across the desolate expanse on which stood, still as statues, thousands of father penguins, each holding on top of his feet a single egg, protected by a flap of warm feathers. They stood for three months. By the time the chick pecked its way out of the egg, the father had nearly starved to death. At this point the mother took over the care of the chick until the father had found food in the ocean, whereupon they took turns babysitting as long as the chick needed them.
What a picture of fatherhood that is. Patience. Sacrifice. Responsibility. Protection. Provision. That is what fathers are for. They beget children, but that is only the beginning. The prophet Hosea pictures the father loving his children, calling them to godliness, teaching them to walk, taking them in his arms, leading them with bonds of love, lifting them to his cheek, bending down to feed them. Of God he writes, “In thee the fatherless find a father’s love” (Hosea 14:3 NEB).
I think of my own tall, spare, rather reticent, but very dear father, and how he would hold his tiny newborn in his two big hands (I remember the births of three of my siblings). I think of how he took us for walks on Saturday afternoons; got down on hands and knees and let two of us ride him like a horse around the dining room, or allowed us to sit, clasping his calves, on top of his size 12 feet as he strode around the room. In him we found a father’s love.
St. Paul was a spiritual father to many. The Corinthians were his “dear children.” “You may have ten thousand tutors in Christ, but you have only one father. For in Christ Jesus you are my offspring” (1 Cor. 4:15 NEB). To the Thessalonians he wrote, “We dealt with you one by one, as a father deals with his children, appealing to you by encouragement, as well as by solemn injunctions, to live lives worthy of the God who calls you into his kingdom and glory” (1 Thess. 2:11 NEB).
Scripture has very strong things to say about fathers who fail to take responsibility for their children. Eli, who had been a judge over Israel for forty years, had never judged his own sons. The child Samuel, his servant in the temple, was sent to him with a message from God: “You are to tell him that my judgment on his house shall stand forever because he knew of his sons’ blasphemies against God and did not rebuke them” (1 Sam. 3:13 NEB). The two sons were killed in battle, the Ark of God was taken, and this news was the death of old Eli.
Many readers have not known a godly and loving father. Many (such as my daughter) have not known a father at all. Yet we have the biblical pictures of fatherhood to show us what it is meant to be.
While the fathers of families have a clear and unavoidable responsibility for their children in the flesh, ought not all Christian men think of themselves as in some measure spiritually responsible for others? May they opt out of fatherly care just because they have no biologically begotten children? Is not God calling them to forsake selfishness and to cease to live for themselves? What does this mean for fathers of families? What does it mean for single men—have they not a special responsibility to sacrifice themselves in ways married men are not free to do?
Look at J. O. Fraser who went to southwest China at the age of twenty-two and gave himself for the Lisu tribespeople, picking them up in his arms, as it were, and carrying them as a father carries his children. He was not married until he had passed forty, yet lived a life of patience, sacrifice, responsibility, protection, and provision for those people who had never before heard of Christ. It was a very lonely life for the only foreigner many of the people had ever seen. For months at a time he traveled on foot or muleback to almost unreachable villages perched high in the snowy mountains. Fraser willingly received his loneliness and his singleness as part of the price of being a servant of the Lord. It was his daily offering.1
And what of spiritual mothers? Anna, an old widow when Jesus was born, spent all of her time in the temple, worshiping day and night, fasting, and praying. What greater work could she have done than thus to give herself for the life of the world? Think of Lottie Moon of China, Malla Moe and Mary Slessor of Africa, Ida Scudder and Amy Carmichael of India—single women, all of them, lonely women, no doubt. But their loneliness accepted meant life for thousands. I could name at least five women, unknown to the world, who have been Life-givers to me—three of them single, two of them widows. They would not have been free to take me to their hearts as completely as they did had they not been alone. They were mothers indeed, nurturers, vessels bearing the life of Jesus. This privilege is not beyond any woman who will give herself wholly to God.
Spiritual mothering was not, in fact, beyond even the apostle Paul. His desire to see the Galatian Christians grow up spiritually was so strong that he actually used a maternal metaphor to describe it: He “travailed in birth” for them. Moses complained to God that he had to nurse the Israelites along as though he were their mother.
The spiritual fatherhood and motherhood I speak of does not always mean that one is the instrument of another’s first coming to Christ, as Paul was of some whom he fathered. Bishops, priests, elders, deacons, and deaconesses are the “parents” of the Church, the watchers, the protectors, the caregivers, the ones who lay down their lives as the servants of all. Think of the potential in the middle-aged women, married and mothers, who are lonely because their own children have gone. If instead of acceding to the usual pressure to do something for themselves “for a change,” they would see the need of the young woman next door whose heart cries out for mothering, or give themselves as volunteers in hospitals and nursing homes where much lonelier women long for companionship, they would be surprised at how the words of Isaiah would come true: “If you . . . satisfy the needs of the wretched, then your light will rise like dawn out of darkness and . . . the Lord . . . will satisfy your needs . . . ; will give you strength of limb; you will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail” (Isa. 58:9–11 NEB).