God Will Not Do What We Imagine {bonus}
Speculating About Our Children
My eldest child spent much of his childhood sitting and reading. I didn’t anticipate that he would be an adult who works and plays outdoors doing high risk, highly physical activity. I look at my younger children and wonder how different their future life will be from their childhood. The independent stage can take a course which, though continuous with the earlier years, could not have been forecast while we were in the middle of them. We might be confident that we know our child better than anyone, but we don’t yet know our child in stages and circumstances which haven’t happened yet. There’s so much more to a person than what we see. God has ordained particulars and our children make choices. These bring about a grown life which we parents do not curate and create.
We love, nourish, provide, discipline, counsel, protect and train our children, but somewhere in the space between what we give, and the life that unfolds, there are mysteries we are not given to know. An outgoing preschooler can be a nervous teenager who settles into a steady twenty year-old, then a troubled thirty year-old, a fruitful forty year-old, a grieved-but-persevering fifty year-old. We cannot make bold claims about the future from any point along the way. People are not dormant.
Our work in mothering is not going to achieve all that we imagine. Our children will grow up to be different from what we once expected (people, like their Maker, are tremendously surprising!). We will leave a legacy, but it won’t be the one we’ve intended. Some of our carefully calculated effort will be forgotten while thoughtless words and actions linger. It’s good to take our family responsibilities seriously. But if we are motored along by a vision cast from our own imaginations, finding out that our vision will not be realised is deeply deflating. We’re forced to consider: what if things don’t go the way I want? Why was I doing all of this? If I had known where it could go, would I have bothered?
The motivation that really sustains motherhood is not a picture of what our child will become, but an assurance that God will be glorified in whatever comes to pass. That God will be glorified is the only sure outcome. The lived story by which he will glorify himself is yet to be seen. God is glorified both when people accept and reject him. He is glorified both in judgement and in mercy. God will most definitely be glorified in our families and our lives, but probably not the way we expected, and at times, not the way we would have preferred.
What if the unexpected that comes is sorrowful? When we imagine God glorifying himself through our families, we don’t hope for suffering or sin. But God doesn’t allow us to design and manufacture glory for him. We cannot prescribe how God’s holiness, power, love and grace will best be displayed. He is free to do as he chooses. He is not confined to our bullet-journal plans.
Speculating About the First and Second Advents
Motherhood isn’t the only place where God’s glory is painfully won, in ways no human would have imagined ahead of time. Before Jesus was born, God’s promises had accumulated for centuries. Hundreds of hints and promises: some specific, others broad. Some fixed in time, others timeless. Some you could pin on a map, others transcending the seen world. I wonder how many well-meaning ancient Jews speculated about the precise story in which the strands would come together. None of them could have guessed. The Incarnation, the virgin birth, the Bethlehem delivery, the flight to Egypt, the return from Egypt, early life in Nazareth; the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus each resolved the ancient promises and clues in a way that no human speculation could. We couldn’t have schemed a narrative where all the fragments feature. God kept his promises in a way that surprised (and often offended) those who waited. At many stages of the story, the glory was veiled before disappointed eyes.
This past Advent, I listened to Dorothy. L Sayers’ cycle of radio plays, “The Man Born to Be King” (BBC 1938). It’s a wonderful piece of art—if you can tolerate the cinematic strings—quietly appreciated by my children and my octogenarian father. It’s sobering to note how speculations about the Messiah blinded many from seeing what God was doing. Disappointment lead to unbelief. Folk tried to interpret too soon and were stunted. They missed the glory because it wasn’t what they had imagined.
I expect that, in some ways, the same will be true of the promises we are still waiting for in Jesus’ return. A lot of ink and air has been spent guessing the precise way in which God will bring his words to fulfilment with the second advent of Jesus. Wouldn’t it be the Father’s way for him to bring the End—the Resurrection, the final Judgement and the New Creation—in particular circumstances that surpass and shatter all our eschatological formulations? In a way that elegantly fulfils every promised detail, in a way that makes sense, but couldn’t have been known ahead of time by anyone but the Father himself? From the “done” side of the End, might we look back on what happened and laugh (or weep) about the chasm between our confident guesses and the surprising marvel that unfolded? We’ll see every detail of every promise realised in ways none of us could have guessed.
God always does better, but with more mystery, than we anticipate. He is tremendously surprising, but the fulfilment can be bewildering for a time. It calls for confident modesty on our part. Confidence in what God has most definitely made plain, modesty about what he hasn’t given us to know yet. And optimism for the surprising glory yet to be revealed.
Speculation is a Bad Motivator
It’s tempting to whip up our motivation for motherhood by speculating about the future–imagining beyond what God has revealed. ”If I do this now, my children will turn out like that. If I read this book, they will learn this virtue. If I drill their worldview, they will never believe a lie.” All these outcomes are possibilities, but not guarantees. And if these outcomes happen it will not be because we got the input right. Children are persons, not machines. The factors that lead to maturity cannot be bought and sold. So why bother with thoughtful motherhood when we don’t know which way the ball will bounce?
Speculations about how (and when) God is going to fulfil his promises cannot be the basis on which we make our decisions now. We’re guessing. A more sound reason for doing what we do (more sound because it is more straightforwardly biblical) is goodness. It is good to put effort into raising our children thoughtfully, not because we want to change the world, but because God says to love wisdom and to raise our children in the ways of his wisdom. It’s good to care about educating our children, not because they are the future leaders (most of them won’t be), not because we are going to be ready to rebuild Western civilisation, but because God says to raise our children in his ways. That’s reason enough. We’re to love them and nourish them and give them all the good we have at hand to give in the present, because God tells us those things are good. We are called to do good, even though there is not a specific guaranteed result. We don’t need to know what the significance is in order for our mothering to be significant.
What is good in the present often doesn’t have a utility that we can discern for the future. God will most definitely achieve something in the future, but we can’t draw a straight line between what we do and what the effect will be. Scripture doesn’t give us specific promises about what our time-bound work will bring about. There are patterns which it is wise to attend to (read Proverbs), but there are also variables in a world cursed by sin, which interrupt these patterns (read Ecclesiastes). We’re told to do it all for the glory of God, but we don’t know in what way God will be glorified in it. It has to be enough for us that he will. Meanwhile, we need to sit humbly with the awareness that how he glorifies himself will surprise us, perhaps even offend us. The process might bruise and break us for a time. If things don’t go the way we imagined, does that mean it has been a waste? No. The bruising and breaking are necessary, both for us and our children. More on that soon.
Our comfort cannot be based on speculation, on clinging to our particular interpretation of what the future will be. God will be glorified, his promises ripening in time, by means which will take us all by surprise. God will glorify himself, but the details are his to know and to make sure. He will triumph in a way that shows it was entirely his great power and mercy and grace, not anything of our attempts at cleverness, that made it happen.
If the greatest hope for our children is that God be glorified, then we’ll receive the bruising differently. It won’t come with the sorrow of wasted effort. There’ll be comfort in whatever happens, knowing that God’s imagination surpasses ours.
