Both Ends Now

Little children have an uncanny way of being blunt and telling it like it is. As parents, we spend a lot of their growing up years trying to teach them the art of diplomacy and kindness (well, at least we should be). It takes a lot of intentionality to help them understand the other side, to have empathy for others but at the same time have appropriate boundaries and strength to stand up for themselves. Daddy taught us siblings to be other-oriented, but also how to not be bullied. He told me once that if someone ever hit me at school, I was not to simply "take it." He said, "You better win that fight." It seemed so counter to his sweet nature for him to say such a thing, but he was teaching us the noble skill of self defense right along with the other lessons of standing up for the weak, the infirm, the little ones. 

Now that we have twelve grandchildren, all under the age of eleven, I am amazed at their candor and pluck. They are observing the world around them and learning what is true, what is not, and what matters. Heaven help their parents. It's not light work. Truth be told, we all mess our kids up in myriad ways, without even meaning to. When people say, "Oh, kids are resilient," I wonder. To me, they're pretty vulnerable and have to learn to navigate in a sometimes crazy world. My folks seemed to do it so well, while I worried so much of my life away, trying to somehow translate that good stuff over to our children. The grace of God is a very wonderful and inexplicable thing.

I see the beginnings of life-- the little ones come here so helpless, but incredibly demanding. Their most basic of needs have to be tended to. They cry, they eat, empty out, sleep, then start over. They can't even lift their heads up by themselves at first. We work with them, making them (hopefully) independent enough to be able to eventually take care of their own bodily functions, then we begin pushing them towards the edges of the nest. All of this takes years. We see extremes on either end of it. There are kids who are made to take on too much, but more often these days, kids who are still modeling truly infantile behavior. Our goal should be to work ourselves out of a job and have sturdy, tough, thoughtful, buoyant adults who can survive. In our culture of abundant resources, it gets harder and harder to do just that. Keep the end game in mind. We're talking about the future of our country, our world. A sacred trust.

The infant starts out helpless, then there's the bounteous, growing years and decades. The end of life, if one lives to a ripe, old age, often tends to taper in a sneaky, incremental way. It creeps up on us, usually because we start giving things up, quit moving, stop calculating what it means to grow. Serenity is good, needful, beautiful, but when I get stuck in my recliner or taking the too-traveled road rather than branching out into all the possibilities that I haven't discovered yet, then comfort becomes my idol, my goal. These are heavy thoughts. I don't know how to fight my iron-poor blood (or the delightfulness of a comfy-cozy chair). Then there's the sage wisdom of Solomon in the Good Book, "For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up..." Then there's the principle of sowing and reaping. I hope we can all find ways to be sowing good seed, even into our old age, and reaping a sweet harvest. A little here, a little there, as we rise up and as we lie down. I'm gonna go tuck into our pile of pillows and dream about what I'm doing tomorrow...