family

Distractions I Love

/ Will N. / Leave a comment

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

If you use social media, you have likely seen several different versions of this type of article.
My hope is it will serve as a reminder to all of us and a simple encouragement to share with young parents who may need it this week.

Once again, you are sitting in worship, and your child is restless.

Perhaps even moving around and getting noisy. You try to calm them down, and things only seem to get louder. You try to pacify them with a small snack, toy, or whispered encouragement, and nothing works. You wrestle with them, and debate whether to wait out the moment or take them outside.

You feel like you are distraction either way.

All the while, you are a little embarrassed, and maybe a little frustrated too. You look around and seem like the only one fighting this fight. You might even think to yourself, “There’s not much point in coming to worship. I can’t focus on the service because I am constantly caring for my kid(s), and I know we are distracting others. What’s the use?”

I humbly suggest you take another look around.

The widow over there quietly gives thanks at the sight of you wrestling with your little one. She was once where you are once, and she knows how hard it can be. Oh, she remembers, but she smiles because to hear small children and see young parents here brightens her day. She received some discouraging test results this week, but even without that recent blow, time tells her that her race of faith is nearing its end. Overhearing the loudly-whispered questions of your little one takes her back to her own youth, her friends, and their families, all gone now, who once shared this sacred space.

That older man who always seems to be a bit grouchy sees you too. He’s always going on about how young people these days have no respect or sense of respect. The world is bad and getting worse is the message repeated each night on the news, but he sees your young family in worship each week, and he can tell how hard you work to be there. He knows something about hard work and hard times. Whether or not he can admit it, seeing (and hearing) your noisy kids gives him a little hope that maybe world isn’t doomed after all. No one would call him an expert on church trends, but even he knows it would be far easier to stay home or head to the lake or the ballpark after a hard week.

The preacher who may look tired and frustrated is not wearied by your presence but because he spent his Saturday night sitting up with a sick church member at the hospital, sharing an infrequent evening with just his own family, or waking early a few hours ago to pray for God to bless today’s lesson. His fatigue is not from your kids- in fact, their presence is a treasured reminder that God is still working in this place.

Keep on bringing your children to worship. As hard as it might be at times when half-asleep and worn down from the week, keep that connection strong. You are an encouragement to so many, and you are placing your children upon a strong foundation.

Whatever we make time for in life is seen as a default priority.

If we set the priority of attending worship as a family when our kids are small, it is far more likely to be second nature for our children as they grow older, make their own choices, and face even more distractions.

For the rest of us, young parents and their kids who are making the effort to be present should never be seen as distractions.

Their commitment is essential- not only to the future but to the present life and impact of every church family.

Our Good Father

/ Will N. / Leave a comment

Recently an older man recounted to me his experience of leaving a small town in West Tennessee in the early 1950s to seek an athletic scholarship at a junior college in the Mississippi Delta.

After a couple of weeks of intense two-a-day practices in the swampy July heat of a Mississippi summer, the young man decided he had seen enough. Without any money, he called his parents late one evening to tell them he would come home and go to work instead of attending college. He would leave the next morning- hitchhiking back to Tennessee, and they could expect him home in a couple of days. He told the coach and his prospective teammates of his plan before lying down for the night.

After a few hours of fitful sleep, he felt himself being roused from his bunk for what he assumed was the normal 5 AM practice.

“I told y’all, I made up my mind. I am not going to stay here. I am going to go home in the morning.”

This man’s eyes glisten even seven decades later as he recounts the moment:

The thing was it wasn’t the coach at all. It was Daddy. He said, “Come on now, son, and get up, we’ve come to take you home.” He never said nothing about it one way or the other, but he must have gotten together the gas money, left right after I called, and drove all that way through the night to get me. He never made me sorry I went or that I didn’t stay. He actually never said anything about it again- he just came and got me and brought me home.

So often in life, we take on more than we can handle- sometimes things that are wrong in themselves, but perhaps just as often, we tackle right things at the wrong time. When we reach our breaking point, we often think all that awaits us is a lecture, a criticism, or an “I told you so.”

The people around us certainly do respond that way at times. It seems so easy to see the errors and missteps in others’ lives- even as it often is so difficult to recognize them in our own.

But our God is different.

He is a Good Father that extends grace to us when we cannot see the clear way home. We are the ones who prepare speeches, practice talking points, and seek to bargain our way back into favor- He is the one who runs to us and lavishly extends welcome and grace (Lk 15).

Like our Father, Jesus, our beloved elder Brother, doesn’t make us try to figure out how to hitchhike up to Him to heaven, but instead humbly comes to us and extends compassion and models a new, better way of living (Phil 2:5-11).

The Spirit and the Scriptures are living and active forces in our lives- lifting our words higher in prayer (Rom 8:26) and guiding our steps day by day as we journey through this life (Ps 119:105).

That homesick teenager graciously brought back home almost 70 years ago, married the sweet beauty queen from the rival high school, built a local business through honesty and hard work, raised two children, and eventually became my grandfather.

He never earned that college degree, but his four grandkids each did, and we went on to have multiple advanced degrees between us- in education, business, pharmacy, and ministry.

He taught us all more life lessons by his example than he ever could have with any amount of higher education- quizzing us on our multiplication prowess at the dinner table, refusing to let us win at a game of H-O-R-S-E, serving with integrity in public office in a small town for decades, and loving each of us just as we were in all the highs and lows of life.

I give thanks that my great-grandfather who I don’t remember drove through the night down to the Delta and to bring home a homesick boy who would grow into a man I will never forget. Because he showed up with love rather than a lecture, that single act of grace lives on, and an entire family exists and our individual stories are unfolding as lives that are committed to growing in grace.

Grace is like that- unearned, undeserved, and most often, unexpected.

In life, sometimes we all need some correction, but we always need more grace.

Grace begets grace, and when we offer grace to one other, we are growing to be more and more like our faithful Father.

No act of grace, however small it seems, is ever wasted in the Father’s will.

Last night, shedding his earthly tent battered by years of toil and broken by recent sickness, my grandfather took his final breath here, and passed into the presence of the great cloud of witnesses and embrace of our Good Father. Like a boat slipping into the water in the pre-dawn stillness of his beloved Kentucky Lake, he left us here and went on to his reward.

We grieve today, but by the grace of the same Good Father, we know some day we will be united in a better land where every sickness ceases, death divides no more, and all who are weary are at rest.

We are thankful that, while we sorrow now, it is a sorrow drenched in the promises of our Good Father and in the hope of better things to come (1 Thes 4:13-18).