“We’re going to wait a few years to have children so we can enjoy some time together just by ourselves.”
Of all the reasons people give for delaying (and ultimately limiting) the size of their families, this one recently strikes me as the most misguided. Not because I know it’s false, but precisely because it is such a small part of the truth.
I just took my boys bowling last weekend, and I can say it was mostly horrific, probably worsening my relationship with them and even with my wife because of how stressful and frustrating it was. Certainly, bowling was far more fun when it was just the two of us. So, yes, it’s far easier to enjoy life without children. No argument.
But when given the choice between merely enjoying the wonder of Each Other’s company for eternity or making us, Our God chose to create a race of children who would yield an abundance of bowling alley experiences. They thought it worth the sacrifice of Their own pure and blissful intimacy to share Themselves with us.
4 comments:
This seemed to be a really strange though of the day to me. First off, all the 'They's and 'Themselves' just freak me out a little... unless I'm mistaken, biblically speaking God is always refered to in the singular (Deut. 6:4) And true, God chose to make us, but the fact that He DID create us is wholly seperate from His TIMING in creating us. You can't apply our time constraints on His perspective. I mean, how do we know He didn't spend eternity past enjoying His own company? Lastly, it really sounds like you're arguing for why a couple's personal preference and opinion on family planning is morally wrong or unbiblical, not why you personally chose a different path: "Not because I know it's false...". Don't get me wrong, I have kids, and had them right away; I'm very glad I did, but it's not because I feel it was the most ethical choice.
I apologize for the confusion with the pronouns. I was trying to reinforce the idea of community within the Godhead as a parallel to the community within a marriage.
Another thing I would probably change in retrospect was that instead of looking at people who delay having children, this thought would probably work better directed toward those who refuse to have children at all. The difficulty is that delaying having children is really a milder form of choosing to not have them at all, but not the same thing, clearly. The thought would certainly have more pull against people who have said, "We don't want to have children because we are just happy enjoying our marriage." The reason I connect them is because that's what a lot of people use as their reason for waiting to have kids, as though the "child-free phase" is a normal and desirable one for early marriages. (BTW, just for honesty, we waited for 6 years before having our first.)
The main point of the thought, (which I think was probably one of my sloppier ones, quite frankly) was that children really are a massive burden and do often reduce the pleasure of marriage. Yet this must be rejected as a primary or acceptable reason to delay or forgo having them. All too often, I feel we parents aren't honest enough with those who don't have kids about the real costs of parenthood.
But is it Divine to forego or delay kids? That's the question of substance here. Is it compatible with the Gospel to limit family size, especially to zero. Far from being a purely personal matter of preference, I believe this is a truly serious moral issue which all too many of us Evangelicals dismiss as a choice we are each entitled to make.
I periodically do an entire show on the ethics of contraception, and the biggest hurdle to overcome in that discussion is simply getting people to realize that this is a very serious ethical issue rather than just a matter of taste to be left to the individual.
I agree with you that we are often reluctant to say that having more children is morally better than having fewer and that having children at all is morally better than having none. But given the simplicity of "be fruitful and multiply" as well as the (poorly phrased) idea in the thought for today about the relationship of the Gospel to child-bearing, our reluctance to say either of these things strikes me as very strange.
Also, I liked your idea of the Trinity enjoying their fellowship for eternity past. The same thought occurred to me, and it's one more reason that applying today's idea against "waiters" rather than "avoiders" was a bad choice by me.
Got it! Actually I definitely agree with you on having children vs. not is an ethical choice... my bad on the phrasing. I was only talking about timing being a choice of personal preference.
You know, it's seeing little conversations like this one go in just this way that is one of my favorite things about my job and about my audience. The Bible talks about humility and coming together as Divine things, and I just love to see it happen, like in this case. You made my day just by the way you responded, K. =)
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