25. An Exchanged Life
25
An Exchanged Life
In the southeastern United States there are hundreds of women who have been mothered by one single woman who gave up her job at Auburn University in order to teach them the Bible, to be available to them when they needed her, to lay down her life. She is Betty Thomas, one of the most unassuming and selfless people I know.
“You can pick out her disciples,” a friend of hers said to me. “They’re different. There is a mark on them—the mark of godliness which they have learned from Betty.” It’s true. I have seen that mark myself.
Last week at a conference in Boston a middle-aged woman whose name I have already forgotten said to me, “I’m an available woman. That’s my job. When people ask what I do, I just say I’m an available woman.” I asked if she ever found herself out of a job. Laughter was her only response. No doubt laughter has been the response of some of those who have heard her job description, but she does the job for God, not for the prestige.
The choice to become parents is a choice to be burden-bearers. Motherhood can change a giddy girl into a sober woman very quickly. Fatherhood means taking on the frightening demands of providing for totally dependent people. It means being willing to give up a good many hobbies and pastimes, the guarantee of an unbroken night’s sleep, the ease of coming and going when you please. It means a willingness to change a diaper (yes, even one that isn’t only wet), take out the garbage, read a bedtime story, lug the potty chair and the playpen and the carseat all over the place. It means using a whole lot of skills you haven’t got, and not using the ones you know you’ve got. A friend who has experience in one rather prestigious field and is now working in a much humbler one wrote to me of the joy of knowing she is where God put her. But sometimes there’s a nagging little voice that reminds her that she isn’t “using her skills.” I quoted her to my sister-inlaw, whose response was, “Good training for motherhood!”
The spiritual analogies are plain. The choice to become a spiritual parent is a choice to lose one’s life. It is a choice to become a burden-bearer. Spiritual dependents are a disruption and a burden. The prospect is daunting, and the greater our appreciation of such a high calling, the greater our sense of inadequacy.
“High expectations can always be crippling,” writes a middle-aged bachelor, ruminating on the postponing of marriage and family.
I don’t want to be slipshod or inadequate, aloof or overbearing; I don’t want to . . . accept tasks that I will do poorly. And so I stop at the pool’s edge, computing the water’s depth, dipping a toe for the temperature, and premeditating, appraising, forming opinions, being practical and praiseworthy, while others very happily swim or pitifully sink. How to explain, otherwise, my ambivalence, my inability to say yes, of course to the issue of marrying and having children after so many paragraphs than to say that I am overawed by the importance and permanence and risk of the issue?1
What God calls us to do is always impossible. Impossible, that is, without His help. It is always too big for us, too demanding. The price is too high. Yet He calls us to count not our lives dear to ourselves. Fathers and mothers haven’t much time to think about the impossibilities. They must simply do the job. They haven’t much time to think about loneliness, either.
It is heartening to find that even in a time when so many seem to be living wholly for themselves, there are men who not only do not shrink from the prospect of fatherhood, they long for it. Harry Stein of Esquire magazine writes of
Conflict between the imperatives of career and those of parenting—in a fuller sense, between achievement on the world’s terms and on one’s own. . . .
On the one hand, what I have with my children is priceless beyond measure; those thousands of hours on the floor amidst blocks and puzzle pieces and assorted dollies, of passing on the wisdom of Johanna Spyri and Dr. Seuss, of concocting games and stories and songs of our own, and simply sitting around not doing much at all, have been the most gratifying, the most emotionally stimulating of my life. On the other hand . . . there are times when the price paid for them seems so terribly high. The fact is, since the arrival of my daughter, three and a half years ago, I have been nowhere near as productive professionally as I’d otherwise have been, as I once was. . . . It is hard not to regret . . . being considerably less far along in what Horatio Alger would call “the game of life” than I once supposed I’d now be.2
He goes on to declare that the exchange has been so overwhelmingly favorable that “the perceived downside hardly bears mentioning at all.” In fact, he says in conclusion, he would not trade it for an armful of Nobel Prizes.
I have four brothers. None has made a pile of money, but all have gained riches of another kind. All are fathers—both physically and spiritually. Phil, the oldest, father of two, has been a missionary in Northwest Territory for more than thirty-five years. He began in an out-of-the-way place called Nahanni where he and his diminutive southern wife built a log cabin and traveled by dog sled in order to learn an unwritten Indian language so that they could give the Gospel to people who did not have it.
Dave, father of four, was a missionary in Costa Rica and Colombia and lives now in Singapore as director of the World Evangelical Fellowship. I meet his spiritual offspring frequently in my travels.
Tom, father of two, is a writer and a teacher. In secondary schools and colleges, in England and the United States, he has spiritually “fathered” young people, trying to impart to them a wider and more glorious Christian vision.
Jim, father of four, is the youngest. He is an artist, and the pastor of a small church in a small city—Cody, Wyoming.
This answers the question of what they do professionally. It tells nothing of the spiritual fathering each has been doing. I don’t suppose any of them has thought of it especially in this way. I have never asked them. But I see it. I know it’s what they do. I also know a little bit about the loneliness life has dealt out to them, though I’ve never heard one of them mention the word. They are men. Each has taken on responsibilities beyond their families and their jobs which have meant my life for yours.