Chapter Ten

Children Are a Blessing, Not a Burden

I didn’t know why I was disrupting the natural-food grocery store, but I was. As I walked down the aisles of the earth-friendly, locally sourced, natural-food shop here in my city, the stares of my fellow customers were as ubiquitous as the word artisanal on the signs and labels around me. Some people would glare and then quickly look down, as if embarrassed for me. For a nanosecond, I wondered if, like in one of those awkward nightmares, I had forgotten to wear clothes. I looked down, and then around, before realizing what the spectacle was all about. They were walking beside and behind and in front of my cart: my five children. One woman, carrying her unbleached, recycled carton of cage-free eggs, cleared her throat and asked, “Are all these yours?” When I said “yes,” she sighed and kind of rolled her eyes. I shrugged and said, “What can I say? We use organic birth control.”

I can hardly turn this account into some sort of culture war clash of caricatures, though that would be easy enough to do. That’s not accurate though. These reactions are hardly the contrast between a Cro-Magnon conservative Christian bound to outbreed the opposition versus the anti-family hostility of granola-rolling hippie throwbacks. First of all, the caricatures probably wouldn’t hold up. There are some Christians (the majority of them in the history of the church, in fact) who have opposed artificial contraception altogether, but I’m not one of them. And, more recently, there have been Christians who believe that trusting God’s sovereignty means having as many babies as one could possibly conceive and birth; I’m not one of them either.

If all the customers there knew about Christians and children were what they had seen on some reality television program, where people put minivans on their bridal registries, then they might see our brood as more bizarre than we actually are. At the same time, if I were to talk to the progressive shoppers in the aisles around me, I imagine we would find more agreement on family than I might expect. Moreover, their attitude toward my children isn’t cordoned away in progressive secular pockets. I’ve been asked, “Don’t you know what’s causing that?” by people at revival meetings, not just by people wearing tie-dye T-shirts. The truth is, I was wrong to be annoyed by the bewilderment with which my neighbors saw all of my children—because I should have understood those attitudes. After all, I once shared them. And sometimes I still do.

There are, of course, major differences between the way people in various subcultures view children. Some have pointed out that one can see the basic cultural ideology, and rate of secularization, in a city based on the ratio of children’s parks to pet boutiques. I am sure there’s some truth to that. But it is not quite the case that more “conservative” areas are necessarily more “pro-family” or “pro-child.” Many of the places that have lots of children around have children born out of wedlock or in complicated custody arrangements navigating different houses every weekend. Even more than that, it’s become almost routine for older people, even within conservative Christian churches, to tell newly married couples (sometimes even in the receiving line at the wedding) not to have children too soon because “you want to enjoy your marriage first.” That seemed normal to me when I married. As a matter of fact, my most ominous fear in those first few years of marriage would be that we might have an “accident” and my wife would end up pregnant before we were “ready.” In order to ensure this, we spent the first several months of marriage using three different forms of “protection,” just in case one or two of them failed. Two lines on a pregnancy test would have been as terrifying to me at the time as seeing a cigarette-smoking clown holding a knife outside my window at night.

Years later, when my wife and I decided we were “ready,” and that we could “afford” children, we spent month after month with the disappointment of one blank pregnancy test after another, followed by a season of miscarriages. Eventually, the doctors told us they doubted we could ever bring a child fully to term. I know how to hide it well enough, so you probably wouldn’t have noticed this had you known me then, but I was seething with rage. Underneath the surface of my life was anger, at myself, at my wife, at God. All my plans for myself seemed to be wrecked. As I said to my wife one night after one of the miscarriages, “I’m now realizing that we are going to die alone.” I spent the first part of our marriage believing we were entitled not to have children, and then the second part of our marriage believing we were entitled to have children. I was wrong in both cases. As I’ve detailed elsewhere, God intervened in our lives, wrecking me and reconstructing me in all sorts of ways, making me realize what an awful father I would have been if children had been as easy to birth as they had been to avoid.44 But I can hardly present myself as a “I once was lost but now I’m found” sort of testimony when it comes to the blessing of children.

My wife and I did eventually have the children we desperately prayed not to have too soon and then desperately prayed to have, at all, first by adoption and then through the more typical way. When I turned forty, I was exhausted. I was in a high-pressure job leading a large academic institution, plus preaching every Sunday and Wednesday, teaching multiple classes ranging from Sunday school to doctoral-level theology, plus writing books and articles and speaking all over the country. Plus, I was a husband and a father of, at the time, four boys. The older two children had special needs related to their early deprivations in a foreign orphanage that sapped much energy. The younger two were close together, and a blur of energy. I had just, it seemed, grown confident that I knew what I was doing in my primary job and, to some degree, as a father. After a long series of board meetings, I came home one night and collapsed on the couch. My wife stood over the edge of the sofa and said, with an almost apologetic tone, “I’ve been trying to think of when would be the least bad time to tell you this, but, I’m pregnant.” My response was to place the pillow over my face and groan. Mind you, by that time I had written a book and a shelf full of articles on the goodness of children. Keep in mind that by this time nothing was a greater joy for me than spending time with my sons. Even after all of that, my word to my wife with a “surprise” baby on the way was just another version of the “Don’t you know what’s causing that?” routine I had so long despised and preached against. Here I was, a kinder, gentler, theologically trained Planned Parenthood.

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At one level, nothing seems as innocent, as non-threatening, as warm-hearted, as the idea of children. At another level, nothing can be scarier than the responsibilities we have with children. The people who warn against not having children too soon are not insane. One of the greatest challenges we have in the social order today is from those who disrupt the pattern of life that moves from personal maturity to marriage to childbearing, putting the children before one or both of the others. Many of the parents who sigh when they see an adult daughter or daughter-in-law pregnant are not so much cynical as they are worried about what will happen, if this marriage falters or if post-partum depression becomes too pronounced or he goes through a mid-life crisis and takes off for Florida with a stripper. What will happen, these potential grandparents, might wonder, if they can’t afford all these mouths to feed? Will they all then end up back here, in the spare bedrooms? These are not unreasonable fears. Moreover, we must do more than simply look at declining birthrates and demographic data before concluding whether our society is friendly or unfriendly to children. There’s quite a difference between the real and perceived social and economic cost of a family of six children among cotton-picking sharecroppers in 1926 rural Tennessee and what there would be for the same family of suburban service workers in contemporary Nashville. There’s also a very different personal cost. The stress levels of a young mother—alone with her husband and children in a city to which they’ve been transferred for work—are quite different than those felt by her grandmother, who would have had far greater financial and even medical burdens, but who also had an extended family and a community of other young mothers just steps from her front door.

Even accounting for all of that, though, we cannot deny that the Bible seems to have a decidedly different view of children than the common one of our age, whether spoken or unspoken. “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward,” the Bible says. “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth” (Ps. 127:3–4). The Bible repeatedly presents the stories of those who cannot have children and yet are blessed by God with a child. This is sometimes the result of anguished prayer (Hannah, for example, in 1 Samuel 1) and sometimes the result of a surprising word from God (the case of Sarah with Isaac). In his original mandate for the creation, God said that humanity would multiply and fill the earth; this was seen as a blessing of the world, not a curse upon it. One might conclude that this is due to the agrarian nature of the Israelite economy. Children were fellow workers in the fields and thus a blessing the way farm equipment might be considered a “blessing.” But there’s more to this than that. Indeed, even in perhaps the harshest, darkest time of early Israel’s life—their sojourn in Egypt—God saw as blessing the fact that the “people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong so that the land was full of them” (Exod. 1:7). Pharaoh saw things differently, saw the children of this people as a burden to be managed, and, in due time, destroyed. The crushing economic burdens he put on this people though did not dissuade them since “the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad” so that the “Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel” (Exod. 1:12). Even when the Egyptian government mandated lethal violence against male children, the people were undeterred, with midwives practicing civil disobedience against the destruction of the children. “So God dealt well with the midwives. And the people multiplied and grew very strong” (Exod. 1:20). God’s blessing on the midwives, defying the fury of Pharaoh for not eliminating children, is, counterintuitively, to give them children (Exod. 1:21).

The fact that children are seen biblically as a blessing does not mean that the Bible idealizes children. In our cultural schizophrenia, we both fear and idealize babies. At least in families with means, children are given rooms decorated more elaborately than a sultan’s would have been in a previous era. Children are expected to be good and kind, often in popular culture the wise voices that see what the adults miss. Even the shocking accounts of cruelty by children, such as in the novel The Lord of the Flies, are alarming precisely because they upend the expectation of idealized childhood, and thus are a signal that something has gone terribly wrong. As Flannery O’Connor once noted, though, “Stories of pious children tend to be false.”45 The Bible does speak of small children with a kind of relative innocence, as not yet knowing good from evil (Deut. 1:39; 1 Kings 3:7–9), and yet does not at all shy away from the sin and cruelty possible for children. David, looking at his own sin, pronounced that “in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5). From Cain and Abel onward, the arrival of children has brought with it the possibility not just of joy but also of sin or suffering. Even with such a realistic view of human nature, though, the Scripture sees the arrival of children as joy and blessing.

That joy and blessing are not just for what we call “nuclear families.” Yes, there are specific instructions given to mothers and to fathers. Those who would argue that a nuclear family unmoored from a larger extended family is a modern innovation are quite right. But this does not mean that the nuclear family itself is an unbiblical innovation. Within the extended household, the relationship between father, mother, and children is still the foundational unit.46 And yet, as we give instruction to mothers and fathers, and future mothers and fathers, some might ask, “What about Christians without children?” The truth is, though, there is no such thing as a Christian without children. You are part of the church, the household of God, a household into which, in every generation, God brings children. You either treat those children as part of your responsibility, as part of the body of Christ, or you will treat those children as, at least as far as you are concerned, orphans. That does not mean that every Christian is responsible to teach children’s Sunday school, but it does mean that children are a sign of God’s blessing and, if you’re in Christ, that blessing is around you, whether you bear children biologically or not.

That’s in some way easy for anyone to see. Even with all the differences we may have in our culture, the birth of a baby is seen, at least in the abstract, as a time of happiness and gratitude. In every era, the birth of a child can also be scary—maybe even more so in times when infant and maternal mortality were higher than they are now in the industrialized world. Nonetheless, cultural changes have shifted the way we see children, sometimes even in ways we don’t fully recognize ourselves.

In every era, though, the birth of children turns out to be a “crisis,” if we think of “crisis” as a turning point. Of course, birth is a “crisis” for the one being born, the first crisis of many that we experience. Even without memory of it, our birthday is marked year by year, noting that there was a time when we were not. The birth of a child is also a “crisis” for the parents of that child. In children, we experience a crisis of both joy and fear, no matter the circumstances. Even the most disenchanted secularist typically sees the birth of his or her own child in terms of awe and wonder. In listening to atheist and agnostic friends describe the birth of a child, the word that comes up most often is “miracle.” Now, I understand that my friends here do not mean this literally—they do not believe in miracles, after all—but it is still instructive that this is the metaphor for which we so often grasp. At first glance, the birth of a child seems the furthest thing from a miracle. Reproduction is the most natural thing in the world. The species depends on it, and it happens every day. And yet, few can look into the face of his or her newborn baby and not well up with tears of gratitude and awed silence. At the same time, even under the best, most “planned” circumstances, the birth of a baby brings a note of unspoken terror. Who can look at a newborn baby and wonder whether or not we, as parents or as grandparents or as a church, will somehow fail this child?

Children bring with them the sense of our responsibilities, and with that the tremor of terror that we won’t be able to live up to those responsibilities. For all of our talk about “pro-family” and “anti-family” or “pro-child” and “anti-child,” debates. The real problem is not so much hostility to children as it is something much more basic: fear. We will almost all admit to some phobia or other: heights, snakes, public speaking. Few will acknowledge a phobia even more powerful, though often conflicted: the fear of babies. The fear is not unreasonable. It is the fear of giving up our lives for someone else.

With the birth of a child, and then at key moments in the growth of that child, we can feel this paradoxical sense of happiness and pain. Think, for instance, of when a child starts the first day of school, or when he leaves home for college, or when she walks down the aisle at her wedding. This is something akin to what C. S. Lewis called “joy”—the sort of longing mixed with both sweetness and pain that we can experience but not quite completely describe. We are taken, when we pay attention to what’s happening, from the cradle straight to the cross. What we hope for in the birth of a new child is what we find ultimately at the cross. And what we fear most, at the birth of a new child, is what we find ultimately at the cross.

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Jesus’ attitude toward marriage was, as we’ve noted, complicated somewhat by his call to take up the cross. Likewise, his attitude toward mothers and fathers was made more complex by the same factor. Jesus’ attitude toward children, though, remains throughout the Scriptures uncomplicated. Jesus loves the little children. Even those not very familiar with religion at all can usually see in their mind’s eye the picture of Jesus with children bustling around on his lap, arms outstretched to bless them. This picture comes from an account in the Gospels when the Bible tells us the crowds were pressing around Jesus, as they often did, this time with parents seeking out the sign-working Rabbi to bless their little ones (Mark 10:13–16). The parents who swarmed Jesus with their children may have just been the sort of parents who, like most of us, want the best for their children. They may have been like the parents in our era who hand their baby to a politician or a star athlete, to snap a picture. Or these parents may have been desperate. Their children may have been sick or injured. They may have been like several other parents in the Gospels who approached Jesus in desperation with their children at the precipice of death, seeking some help from the One they had heard could command demons and channel nature and even turn back disease and maybe even death itself.

The disciples held these parents and their offspring back. Jesus, Mark wrote, was “indignant” and rebuked them (Mark 10:14). Now, the Bible does not explain exactly why the disciples didn’t want the children there, but it is probably not because they were child-hating misanthropes. They probably instead were merely attempting, as they often did, to keep the crowds from mobbing their teacher. The implication is present, though, that the disciples may have seen children as a distraction from their mission. The anger that flared in Jesus is one we see usually in the Gospels in only two areas: in the face of religious hypocrisy or in the exclusion of those the powerful deem not to matter (as in, for instance, Jesus’ anger that the temple was a den of robbers rather than a house of prayer for all people). Moreover, we see Jesus repeatedly in the Gospels rebuking the disciples for their ideas of power and position and strength. This seems to be the exact same point Jesus is making here: “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child cannot enter it” (Mark 10:15).

In the Gospel of Mark, the welcoming of the children is placed in what seems to be a random conjunction of unrelated incidents. In the passage immediately before, Jesus addressed the ethics of divorce and remarriage, grounding the permanence and monogamy of marriage in God’s creation design (Mark 10:1–13). Immediately after the welcoming of the children, Jesus is portrayed as telling a rich young man he must sell all his possessions and give everything to the poor in order to enter the kingdom (Mark 10:17–31). Overshadowing all of these incidents, though, is later in the chapter, in which Jesus told his disciples, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles” (Mark 10:33). The accounts before could seem to be disconnected vignettes of Jesus’ love for marriage and babies and the poor, but they are connected, as is everything in the Gospels, by the entire point of Jesus’ mission: “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Jesus welcomed children because of the cross. In order to see then how children are part of our cross-bearing life, we must understand how Jesus views children in the first place and how the hostile powers of the old order view them. To understand children, we must understand the gospel.

What does Jesus mean when he says that no one can enter the kingdom unless one does so as a little child? First of all, he seems to mean that one can only come into spiritual life the same way we came into biological life: by sheer gift. One cannot enter the kingdom of God by means of “flesh and blood,” Jesus told Nicodemus, but only by being born again (John 3:3). Nicodemus can be forgiven for taking Jesus too literally, wondering how it is that one can re-enter his mother’s uterus in order to pass muster at Judgment. In some ways, Nicodemus, even in his ridiculous misunderstanding, was closer to Jesus’ meaning than we often are. After all, for many of us, “born again” is simply a metaphor for a particular kind of Christian, one who has what we call a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” The metaphor, though, tamed through familiarity, is meant to jar. The connection between new birth and birth itself is necessary to get the striking sense of our own helplessness to perform our way into God’s new creation. We did nothing to earn our own birth, or to construct our own genetic code or time of conception. Sometimes an angry child will yell at his mother, “I didn’t ask to be born!” That’s true, of course, of all of us. Life is a gift.

Even in the means by which God designed the human race to march onward, we are shown over and over that we are not manufacturers of the next generation but receivers of something mysterious to us, uncontrollable by us. A child is conceived, at least in the natural order of things, not by an architectural act of will but in the joining of two people in an instant in which we are, arguably, the least in control of ourselves: the release of sexual union.47 This sense of life as gift points us to even more ultimate realities. When God wished to communicate to people that he knew them better than they knew themselves, God did so by pointing to his knowledge of them in the womb. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” God said to Jeremiah (Jer. 1:5). “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,” David sang to the Lord (Ps. 139:15). The same is true for our life in the kingdom. Through the cross of Christ, we were given, John says, “the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12–13). Whoever you are, whatever your situation, your story started with an act of grace, an act of grace that you could have done nothing to earn, because prior to it you did not even exist.

This brings us to what I believe is the central point of Jesus’ metaphor of children inheriting the kingdom—that of vulnerable dependence. This is a point that Jesus made repeatedly—that we are those who must ask for daily bread, those who learn to cry out “Abba, Father.” The language of childlikeness is especially evocative of that sort of dependence and vulnerability. Often, when a baby is born, a new parent will experience the fear that he or she might drop the baby by accident. “He just seems so fragile,” a new mother might say of her son. “She just feels so delicate; I’m afraid I will break her,” a new father might say of his daughter. The baby is indeed fragile. A human child cannot exist on his or her own. We must be “knit together,” to use the biblical language, in our mothers’ protective wombs, and then we must be dependent on our mothers for our food, for warmth, for the most basic protection from the elements. Our very first moments in life are demonstrable evidence of what we often spend the rest of our lives seeking to prove otherwise: that we are mortal, dependent creatures of flesh and blood. We are not gods but men and women, and we did not even start as men and women but as baby boys and girls.

This dependence is bound up with our life in the cross. The book of Hebrews says, in what I believe is one of the most important passages in all of Scripture, that a crucial aspect of Jesus’ defeat of the devil is in the sharing of our humanity. Jesus is a human being, in solidarity with us. He can, therefore, serve as an offering for our sin, as a priest to represent us before God. The writer of Hebrews points back to the psalmist’s claim that God has put “all things” under the feet of humanity and asks how this can be when we clearly do not see all things governed and ruled by humanity (Heb. 2:5–8). If this were so, we would not see human beings made homeless by hurricanes or suffocated by congestive heart failure or picked apart cell by cell by cancer. “But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb. 2:9). The glory and dominion we so crave—whether in our quest for wealth or for fame or for athletic prowess or by winning arguments—is all seen not in independence and swaggering confidence but in humiliating dependence, in the crucifixion of Jesus.

The moment the Bible identifies Jesus as crowned with authority, as bearing glory and honor, is the moment when he is the most dependent, the most powerless, the most seemingly useless to the outside world. It is the moment in which Jesus had to be helped with the carrying of his own instrument of torture. It is the moment when he was having his beard ripped from his face as he was beaten up by abusive Roman soldiers. This is the moment when Jesus was lifted up, not by his own power but by the power of those who were killing him; when Jesus said, “I thirst,” as he could not even hydrate himself but must take sour vinegar from a sponge on the end of a stick. This is the moment where Jesus seemed to be displaying anything but “glory and honor.”

At the cross, Jesus demonstrated that the weakness of God is more powerful than the strength of the world, that dependence upon God is greater than the independence of self-effort. We are called to be conformed to that cross even in the way that we are born: not as self-sustaining producers but as frail, fragile children of dust. We are not promoted into the kingdom, and we are not recruited into the kingdom. We are “begotten” into the kingdom (1 John 5:1 kjv), born again to newness of life. And we arrive there just as we arrived in the first birth, carried by a power other than our own. In order to find the kingdom, we must find that weakness, again.

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No matter how strong or influential we think we may be, our kindergarten class pictures can show us otherwise. When we look at the image of ourselves as that young boy or girl, we can almost immediately feel all the fears and insecurities of that time. If we’re honest, we will also admit that we are, in many ways, still that same person, still protecting ourselves from being hurt. That sense of vulnerability leaves us with conflicted feelings about ourselves, and thus about children, who remind us of where we started and where we must end up. On the one hand, vulnerability is exactly why most people love babies, whether human or animal. We may admire a tiger marching back and forth in its cage at a zoo, but the tiger cub will draw a crowd for a different reason, usually with several people sighing, “He’s so cute!” For the same reason, advertisers will use images of babies and toddlers for scenes for which they would never think of featuring adults. The babies are non-threatening. They cannot hurt us, at least not in that way. Ironically enough, it is this same vulnerability that makes children so scary. They cannot hurt us physically, but they can be hurt by us. And we know that, sooner or later, they could break our hearts.

Moreover, in a fallen world in which human beings, like animals, seek to protect ourselves from one another with displays of strength and aggression, small children seem oddly out of sync. Their vulnerability and dependence are thus used as a weapon to marginalize them, to make them invisible, when we do not want to see them. Children at their most vulnerable, in the womb of their mothers, are made much of when they are deemed to be “wanted.” When they are deemed to be intrusive, they are made invisible by the use of clinical language such as “embryo” or “fetus” or “product of conception,” in order to make violence against them more palatable to the conscience. The children of refugees and immigrants are likewise made invisible by language—often presented culturally or politically as parasites or as “anchors” for their parents to draw welfare benefits from a wealthier country. No matter how civilized we may believe ourselves to be, we can see what happens when a child happens to be in the category of both unpopular and defenseless, and the results are tragic. The way of the cross is different.

Unfortunately, we will never create a true culture of welcoming children if we do not upend the priorities of our churches when it comes to power. Why is the church so constantly drawn to economic and political power? This is not only the case for the highest levels of the church—whether medieval popes or contemporary culture warriors—but also shows up in local assemblies. We are drawn to the conversion testimonies of celebrity athletes or beauty contestants or reality television stars because they bring a sense of weight and influence, on their own terms—a weight and influence they are, in our view, lending to the gospel. In how many congregations are decisions made on the basis of spoken or unspoken decisions about who gives the most money and who might, if he or she were rankled, withhold that money? In such situations, we can see where our true religion is, and it is summed up in the dollar sign of Mammon not in the cross beam of Jesus. The same principle is at work sometimes in the “excellence” with which we run our worship services, as though the outside world needs to see our inability to fumble. When the church prioritizes power, influence, access, expertise, invulnerability, how on earth can we see ourselves as little children? If all of our illusions were put away, and if we were to see where we are on the scale of the trillions of years in front of us, we would see that we are, in fact, embryos and fetuses in the kingdom of God. We are able to be hurt, but hemmed in all around by the protective embrace of our God. When we see children—whether those the world considers “impressive” or the ones the world considers “defective”—we do not see their “potential,” as though their lives will matter when they are grown and “contributing to society.” We can see instead our own potential—if we would put aside our vain pretensions to superiority over others, to self-confidence and expertise, and to simply hold out our hands and cry, “Abba, Father!” We must crucify our lust for power. Our Father doesn’t love us because of what we might do, nor does he need us in order to accomplish his will, but he does want us to reach for him, as desperate and dependent children.

This sense of dependence not only expresses the goodness of children, but also defines the way we parent them. Much of what amounts to parenting counsel in this era—whether from the church or from the outside world—amounts to technique. We are told the strategies to employ—whether it be how to install a car seat or how to toilet train or how to set boundaries for dating. Much of this is worthy and needed, but it can lead us, unintentionally, to the idea that children are one more means of technology, that they are an operating system for which we learn the code. Christian parenting will include many of these strategies, to be sure, but true Christian parenting starts not when we know what to do, but when we do not. We lead our children in a cross-shaped way when we acknowledge that we do not know what to do but must rely on our own Father for grace and for power.

Sometimes people will ask me what I think is the best biblical counsel for parenting, expecting, I think, that I will turn to one of the familiar proverbs on discipline or perhaps to Deuteronomy on instruction. Instead, I choose the account of the people of Judah standing before a foreign army of massive power coming to wipe them out. Jehoshaphat, the leader of the people, reminded them of God’s presence with them in the story of their redemption, of his covenant promises. But he does not do so in a sloganeering “We can do this!” sort of way. Instead, he prays aloud for God’s intervention: “For we are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chron. 20:12). Children—whether in a home or in a church—are not a marauding army threatening us (though it may sometimes feel like that), but nevertheless this passage holds a great deal of relevance for parenting. The Scripture tells us what was at stake for Jehoshaphat and Israel—not just their individual lives but those of “their little ones, their wives, and their children” (2 Chron. 20:13). What was at stake was the welfare of their families, and they were powerless. This has everything to do with parenting. No matter how many books or articles we read or godly examples we follow, every parent will eventually reach this point of powerlessness and despair. Knowing this, and turning in dependence upon God, is something of what it means to come before him as a little child. Therein is the kingdom of God.

That constant biblical call to cross-shaped dependence is why I’ve changed my mind about “baby dedications” in churches. Many of you will not understand what I’m referencing, especially if you come from a Christian communion that baptizes infants. My communion does not; we baptize only those who profess that they believe the gospel and seek to be disciples. As such, I cynically dismissed “baby dedications,” times in a church service when parents would stand with their newborns to dedicate their lives to the Lord, as just a way to do a “dry baptism” for low-church Protestants. As the years have gone by, though, I have seen that these times of dedication fill an urgent need for families and for the church. This is not so much for the children as for their parents, and for the rest of the congregation. The parents crowding around Jesus wanted a word of blessing upon their little ones. In our hyper-naturalistic time, we tend to lose the sense of what a “blessing” is, other than a rote prayer before a meal or spiritual-sounding language that we use to mean “lucky.” The Bible, though, is filled with blessings, blessings that are sometimes wrestled for, sometimes lied about for, sometimes given on a deathbed. A blessing is to commit another to the good purposes of the Lord. Rightly done, a dedication by parents of their children can be a signal that these children do not in fact “belong” to the parents but to the Lord. Moreover, it can be a sign to the rest of the congregation that the rearing of these children is not simply up to the parents on the platform but to all of the gathered body.

Years ago, I saw a cartoon in a Christian magazine of a mother standing beside a crime scene as her son was handcuffed and arrested by police. The crying woman is pictured screaming, “Oh son! Oh son! Where did your youth pastor go wrong!” The point of the cartoon was to lampoon the way that many Christian parents neglect the discipleship of their children, believing this can be outsourced to the “professionals” within the church. That is, of course, a major concern, and one the church should correct. But the opposite tendency must be confronted as well: the idea that parents must rear their children alone, that such is none of the church’s business. No amount of expertise is enough for that. We need the grace of God, and we need each other.

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Children picture the kingdom in another way. The kingdom is the reign of God in the future, breaking backward into the present by the cross-rule of Jesus. Children likewise represent the future, and that is a blessing from God. Sometimes I will hear from Christians, or others who wonder if they should have children at all since, “I wouldn’t want them to grow up in a world like this.” I even knew of a young Christian couple planning to sterilize themselves before their wedding, so that they would not bring a child into a world of cultural decadence or environmental catastrophe or nuclear war. Most people do not act with such extreme behavior, but the fears we face for our children are bound up in the same reasons we have such hope for them: we cannot see the future they will inhabit. We don’t want them to enter a world where they will suffer. This is—let me say this as diplomatically as I can—nonsense. We are the people of the cross. Jesus told us beforehand that the times we would face—no matter when or what they are—would be filled with trials and tribulations but also with the presence of the Spirit of Christ himself (Matt. 28:20).

We can address our worries about suffering for our children in the opposite way as well, by denying to ourselves such possibilities and reassuring ourselves that the gospel will make all things well for our children and their future. This attitude is summed up in a Bible passage that has become something of the new John 3:16 for American cultural Christianity: Jeremiah 29:11. This passage, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope,” shows up on wall plaques, on social media memes, even on tattoos. I have seen this verse “claimed” fervently by people who haven’t been in church since before the first Bush Administration, but who are quite confident that this is God’s way of telling them that their future is bright. The idea that prosperity and flourishing are just right around the corner resonates well with a consumerist American culture where optimism itself is a marketing strategy. Many think this verse tells them to have confidence in themselves, to follow their hearts, knowing that God will make their life-plans successful. Anyone who could find this sort of message in the prophet Jeremiah has never read any verse of Jeremiah above or below this one. The book of Jeremiah is all about God disrupting his people’s plans and upending their dreams, starting with those of Jeremiah himself. This verse says the same. The exiles had been carted off from their homeland to Babylon. God seemed distant. The situation seemed as though they had been raptured away to judgment and that God’s blessing was for those “left behind” in Jerusalem. Jeremiah’s prophecy made the opposite case: God would bless the nation through the exiles.

That’s good news for the world. That’s good news for the nation. But it is hardly good news for any individual in the situation. Those left in Jerusalem didn’t like this message so they found “prophets” who would tell them that peace was just around the corner (proving that entrepreneurial religious hucksterism is not a uniquely modern or American phenomenon). For the exiles, the message wasn’t a cheery one either, at least in any future they would see in the short term. In Jeremiah’s letter, they were told that their return from exile wouldn’t happen in their generation. They should, then, create new lives in Babylon. If the exiles had known that they were getting what they wanted—immediate deliverance—they might rationally have held off on marrying and having children until they were back home. If they knew there was no hope for their future as a people, they might likewise give up on the future altogether. Instead, God told them, they should have children because there was a future and a hope for them, even if it was too far off for them to see. When everything seemed chaotic and random, God had a purpose for them. The exile wouldn’t be permanent.

In that sense, Jeremiah 29:11 applies to us. We, too, have a future and a hope, one that is bound up in the life of Christ. And yet, we do not have a generic Christ but a crucified One. Our plans may evaporate. Our dreams may be crushed. Our lives may be snuffed out. But God’s gospel—good news for us, for our flourishing and not for our destruction—will march on. Now, the future waiting for us may well not be one that the culture around us prizes. In fact, our futures may be those that would cause us to tremble if we saw them in a crystal ball. But, long term, our future is cosigned with Christ. Our ancestors in Babylon could know, not from observing their situation, but by the promise of God, that there was a future for them. So they could have babies and rear families and trust their God. The same is true for us.

That “children are the future” sounds like a truism bordering on the banal. And yet, this is one of the most difficult truths for us to grasp. We know, rationally, that there was a time—a vast expanse of time—before us when we didn’t exist. And we know that there will be another vast expanse of time after we have passed from this earthly life. Knowing this truth, though, is not the same as facing this truth. The Scriptures, especially the Psalms, include many passages about the shortness of life. We must learn to “number our days” (Ps. 90:12) in order that we may have wisdom for the present. We must see that our lives are like the flower of the field, flourishing one day and then gone (Ps. 103:13). The arrogance of all our plans for ourselves must be tempered by the knowledge that our life is just a mist “that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14). We must be reminded of this so often because, left to ourselves, we sinfully imagine that we are independent, self-existing, and immortal. In short, we believe ourselves to be gods, forever unaccountable to the judgment bar of God. The cross reminds us otherwise. So, too, do babies. This is one of the reasons why our culture so often prizes youth and vitality, why people panic at the sight of a grey hair or a sagging stomach. We do not want to be reminded that we will die. And that’s one reason why every generation tends to disparage the generation coming after. We do not want to be reminded that we are replaceable.

My wife is amused by how often I will, seemingly out of nowhere, say to her, “Do you realize that I am now older than my mother was when we married?” or “Can you believe that we are now ten years older than that Sunday school teacher at our home church was, the one we thought was ancient at the time?” I will sometimes look at my sixteen-year-old sons and reminisce on just how antiquated my own parents seemed when I was sixteen (although they were younger then than I am now!). When a friend of mine told me that his grown son and his wife were expecting a child, my first thought was to be happy for their family, but I’ll admit that my second thought was that it made me feel old that my peer was now a grandfather. Children remind us of our coming obsolescence.48 And that too is a grace. Children show us that our future is not bound up in our striving and our performance. This is crucial for us to realize if we are to be made whole.

The ancient fertility religions of Canaan were so bloodthirsty because they asked people to sacrifice their children in order to bring blessings on themselves. They were to mortgage the future for the sake of the present.49 The valley of Gehenna, which Jesus used to picture the judgment of hell, was a garbage dump, filled with fires. But it was originally the place of pagan worship, where people sacrificed their children to the god Moloch (2 Kings 16:3; Jer. 32:35).50 The desolation there, spanning even the biblical testaments, was such that the place was fit only for the burning of refuse. The sacrifice of children might seem to bring present stability, but in fact it led only to hell. In our time, very few would physically sacrifice the lives of their children, but many do so through neglect or abandonment or various other ways. In expecting our children to meet our present needs, instead of pouring ourselves out for our children’s future, we get not the stability we seek but a shiver of hell.

One can see this sometimes in churches that refuse to cultivate younger leadership or who do not want the burden of dealing with crying babies or rowdy adolescents or unstable new believers. These churches, or denominations, sometimes become virtual gerontocracies, never seeming to notice that there are fewer and fewer younger people around. This can seem liberating, in the moment, for those who want no tension about what music should be played or what programs should be offered. The church can seem “just like home” because it is a vehicle of nostalgia rather than mission. But, without new life, it will die with its members. This is a witness not to the crucified and resurrected Christ but to the Darwinian leer of a lioness devouring her young.

When we see godly older people pouring their lives into younger generations and churches doing the same, there is almost always one common denominator: the older generation is remarkably free of bitterness and jealousy. The younger generation embraces these mentors not because of their perceived “relevance.” These are, to the contrary, often those who do the least to pretend to still be young. Instead, the distinguishing factor is that they are not threatened by those who will replace them. They have a secure identity in Christ, so they are willing to decrease in perceived power and “usefulness” without feeling an existential threat. We find that at the cross.

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The future children bring is one of joy, but also of sacrifice, sacrifice but also of joy. This is the paradox of modern parenthood that one journalist calls “all joy and no fun,” arguing that changing roles of mothers and fathers and children mean that children often remodel their parents’ lives in fundamental ways, from their marriages and vocations to their habits and hobbies, and even their own sense of self.51 This is true, and while this may be heightened by modern parenthood it is hardly unique to it. Look at the biblical witness to the heights of fulfillment a child can bring to a parent, say, in the Proverbs, and to the depths of agony in, say, David’s lament over his son Absalom. Much of this is due to the fact that we just cannot see as we are parenting how everything is going to turn out.

I once had a couple ask me to reassure them that they could adopt without “too much risk.” When I pressed on what they meant, the husband told me that adoption and foster care were scary to him because “you never know who is going to show up.” Now, I’m the first to admit that adoption and foster care bring with them special challenges, and those who step into such arenas should be equipped for them. But it is also true that no matter how a child comes—whether by adoption, foster care, or biological reproduction—“You never know who is going to show up.”

A child is not a replicant of one of his parents, nor is he a mixture of replications from the two of his parents, as though he were 60 percent his mother and 40 percent his father. Every human being is unique—with unique gifts, weak points, callings, besetting sins, personality types, and so on. One of the reasons parents are sometimes frustrated with their children is that the children are not mere copies of their parents, with the same tendencies, hopes, aspirations, and interests.

Jesus taught us about family when he welcomed the little children, and he kept teaching us all the way to the Place of the Skull. Following his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus told his disciples, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:24–25). He said that his time of glory had come, that he would be lifted up and would thereby draw all people to himself. This was, John wrote, “to show by what kind of death he was going to die” (John 12:33). He would not draw the world to himself by his teaching or by his miracles but by the sacrifice of himself. That’s, of course, exactly what the cross did. After his resurrection, Jesus ascended to his Father and poured out the Spirit, a Spirit that went out on a search-and-rescue operation that drew together people from every conceivable tribe and nation, down through the centuries, joining us all together in one new household, all of us finding our new lives in the crucified Christ. The love between Christ and his church, consummated at the cross, was fruitful, and it multiplies. The bride of Christ did not know “who was going to show up” when the union consummated at the cross started to bear fruit. That’s, as a matter of fact, where most of the fights and tensions of the New Testament emerge. Jewish Christians were learning to live with these Gentile newcomers, and vice versa. The cross means that the future is about self-sacrifice, not self-preservation.

Those who hope their children will make up for whatever they feel they “missed out” on in life—whether that’s in terms of education or career or spiritual vitality—will inevitably be disappointed. Our children do not need to be “successes” in the way the world defines success. A child certainly does not exist in order to make up some real or perceived deficiency in the parent. Some parents idolize their children, with the parents finding their sense of identity in the life of the child. And some parents abandon their children literally. Some parents abandon their children to be shaped by their peer group or by the ambient culture or by the child’s own appetites. None of these is the way of the cross.

Children are also difficult because nothing seems to expose what the self actually is more than bearing responsibility to lead a child to adulthood. When I was an adolescent, I was a parenting expert. I would never say this aloud, but I could tell you everything I thought my parents—especially my father—was doing wrong in rearing me. I expected him to be not just mature but omniscient and omnipotent. When he made (what I considered to be) mistakes, I found it mind-boggling. As a father myself, though, I’ve heard myself saying aloud to my children some of the very things I thought were stupid when I heard my own father say them to me. I understand now why, for instance, he needed several days to recuperate from family vacation. “If he has this time off,” I would think at the time, “Why don’t we stay gone all of those days? Why on earth would we come home for him to sleep on the couch?” I get it now. More importantly, though, I now realize that a child’s view of what it means to be an adult just isn’t accurate.

We often assume that one acts like an adult because one feels like an adult. In truth, the reverse is true. One never really feels like a grown-up. No matter how one matures, we never get to the point of feeling confident in all our choices and actions. In many ways, we all still feel like scared and confused children. When one is a parent, though, one must nonetheless make decisions and bear responsibility. We must lay down our lives for the children God has given us. We cannot evade or resent the time and energy and maturity and financial responsibility demanded of us by the realities of adulthood and parenthood. We also, though, mustn’t act as though we can bear all of that by our own power, especially since—as we have seen—children often show us just how powerless we can be.

Babies are a blessing, not a burden. Yes, babies will keep one from living out all of one’s dreams for self-actualization. God doesn’t want us self-actualized. He wants us blessed. There’s a difference. And churches filled with people who fear babies because they want more freedom to pursue the American Dream will not be gospel-centered, evangelistic churches. The self-interest that sears over the joy of birth will also sear over the joy of new birth. We should never equate fertility with spirituality. That’s the old error of Canaanite religion. God is going to lead some believers, perhaps many, not to marry so that, like the apostle Paul and many of the great missionaries of the church, they can devote themselves totally to gospel service. Others will marry but will not be blessed with large families, or with children at all. But, at the same time, can’t we insist that our view of children be dictated more by the book of Proverbs rather than Madison Avenue or Wall Street?

There are signs that, at least in some small ways, the predominant Christian view of children is starting to reconnect with more ancient wisdom. Some of this might have to do with the place of Christianity in Western culture. A previous generation of American Christians often sought desperately not to seem “freakish” to American culture, in order to win America for Christ. Thus, we saw much emphasis on “God and country” patriotism and “cultural relevance” and a downplaying of some of the deeper aspects of Christian doctrine and spirituality. Increasingly, though, it is harder and harder not to seem “freakish” in American culture, merely by holding on to the most base-level commitments of Christian ethics. If being married and staying married already marginalizes Christians from their peer groups, embracing a different view of children is not that far a step to take. If you are already outside the borders of what American culture considers the “good life,” maybe it doesn’t seem so odd to delay children until marriage and to celebrate children within marriage.

We are not guaranteed that our children will follow us in the gospel. God often starts off with new growth, bringing in those whose families never knew the Lord, even as some who grew up hearing the gospel fall away. But we have a biblical mandate to do two things at once: to share the gospel with all persons and to recognize that evangelism often includes raising up children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. If we miss that point, our churches and families will absorb the message of much of the culture around us, a message that sees self as central and children as a nuisance. The growth of gospel Christianity means calling sinners to repentance and nurturing our children. We hold fast to the gospel in the revival tent, and at the dinner table, both.

I started out adulthood deeply fearful of children. I knew they were expensive. I didn’t know how expensive—in both money and in anxiety and in emotional energy. I also didn’t know the joy that could come with a little hand gripping mine. I didn’t know the glory one could see in baptizing one’s child as one’s brother in Christ. I didn’t know that children would be spiritual warfare, and that the warfare would be as sweet as it would be tough. Children, whether in the family or in the church, represent newness of life, the ongoing providence of God for the future. That’s why the demonic powers so often come against children (from Pharaoh to Herod to the sex trafficking and abortion industries). When we embrace children, we share in the joy of the future. Children point us to the truth that the world has a future, and that the church has a future. God has yet more to do for the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. We can therefore rejuvenate and laugh and play, seeing right in front of us the gracious sign that we are not the pinnacle of life. We are bridging the way to the future, and God is there too. We also, though, open ourselves up to hurt. That’s because parenting, whether familial or ecclesial, is not an economic transaction.

Parenting is living sacrifice, unconditional love. We bless our children not by weighing them down with expectations we couldn’t bear ourselves, and not by leaving them to find their own way through the thicket of life. We bless our children by modeling maturity and by modeling childlikeness. We bless our children by keeping our promises, as best we can, but also by forgiving them, forgiving each other, and forgiving ourselves. And we bless the future by showing that love is greater than power, that a baby’s cry is more hopeful than an army’s siren. That’s because the cross is more powerful than the crowd. A child can show us that grace is better than will, the future is better than the past, and that Christ is better than the self. A child can show us that we enter the kingdom not as conquering victors but as newborn infants. That’s because we were brought into the kingdom not by our successes but by another’s obedience. We could not earn that. We could only receive it. “What man and woman, if they ever gave serious thought to what having children inevitably involves, would ever have them?” asked Frederick Buechner. “Yet what man and woman, once having had them and loved them, would ever want it otherwise?” Buechner imagined what it would be like to wish away magically the pain associated with someone he loves. He couldn’t do it, “because the pain is so much a part of the love that the love would be vastly diminished, unrecognizable, without it.”52 Indeed, love for one’s children without pain would be as unrecognizable as a resurrected Christ without nail scars.

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As scared as I was of having children “too early,” and as scared as I was of having children “too late,” God prepared, through all of that, Maria and me to hear from our doctor that, based on what he saw in an ultrasound, he thought that late-coming child might have Down syndrome. By that time, God had enabled us to be at peace with that, to be ready to bear whatever sacrifices would be needed, to rejoice in this new life. We didn’t know what was awaiting us, but we didn’t with the others either. When the doctor told us this, we looked at each other and knew that this child would be a gift. His worth and value wouldn’t be based upon whether this age saw him as having “power” or “success” but instead upon the fact that this child was made in the image of God. We prayed that through our son we would see better, and bear witness better to, the gospel we had embraced of a Christ who was crucified in weakness and yet lives by the power of God.

Several weeks before the due date, on a Sunday morning as I was about to preach, I noticed during one of the opening hymns that my wife wasn’t in her normal pew at our church. I slipped out during the offering and found her in the foyer. “Oh, I didn’t want to bother you before you preached,” she said. “My water has broken, but I know I’m a while away from giving birth. You go ahead and preach and then we’ll go to the hospital.” I told her she was insane, ran up to our minister of music to tell him he was preaching that day, and whisked her off to the hospital. A couple of hours later, he was here. He didn’t have Down syndrome. The doctors were just as wrong as they were when they told us we wouldn’t have children. Someone said, “You must feel like you dodged a bullet.” No, not really. He didn’t have Down syndrome, but someday he’ll have something else. Maybe he will get sick or get hurt or lose his way, and we will be there, maybe reminding ourselves all along that he is a gift, that a child has upended our plans before, and we found that our plans needed upending. He interrupted one of our Sundays, but he didn’t interrupt our lives.

Earlier, I wrote that children are a blessing, not a burden. That’s not really true. As with many other things in the Christian life, this is not an “either/or” but a “both/and.” Children are a paradox in that children are both a blessing and a burden. In fact, they are a blessing because they are a burden, and a burden because they are a blessing. The burden is the blessing. The gospel, in fact, redefines the very concept of “blessing” in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. This applies not only to how we view our own sense of happiness, but also how we define happiness as it relates to the children around us, whether our own or the next generation within the church. “The ancients were afraid to display their happiness for fear the gods would punish them. We moderns are afraid to display our unhappiness for fear our neighbors will disapprove of us,” Eugene Peterson writes. “The ancient world never expected to be happy and was sometimes surprised by little episodes of it. The modern world expects to be happy all the time and is full of resentment when it isn’t. And then Jesus appears and says, ‘Blessed are you.’”53 That’s a paradox, to be sure, but one that we should find familiar. After all, we start and end our lives at just such a paradox: at the cross.

To find a future, we must stop our pretending and protecting, and become as little children. As we do so, we will find that we will love the children among us. We will love to see the newness of life—the signs of the future—we see as new believers come to Christ, as we bear their burdens and seek to disciple them to maturity. In so doing, we might see that the kingdom of God is not a lonely capsule for isolated individuals but, as the prophet Micah called it, “like sheep in a fold, like a flock in its pasture, a noisy multitude of men” (Mic. 2:12). If we picture this rightly, this dependence, this vulnerability, this hope for the future, it just might be that the culture around us will look at this bustling, unruly church and ask, “Don’t you know what’s causing that?”

And we will say, “Yes. Yes we do.”