As adults, I think it’s so easy to forget where we came from. We’re so used to being reliant on ourselves for everything. We feed ourselves when we are hungry; we transport ourselves to places; and we buy, get and do whatever we want. We forget that there was ever a time when we were small, mewling babes who couldn’t do a thing, especially if our lives depended on it.
It never ceases to amaze me how small infants are, especially newborns. With the recent birth of my daughter Emma, I have been reveling in her small fingers, toes, legs, arms and body when I hold her. She reminds me how helpless and precious and reliant newborns are, a fact that I had begun to forget, having an increasingly independent two-year-old roam around the house.
My wife and I enjoy watching nature documentaries. In the documentary shows about animal babies, one of the things I’ve noticed is how much instinct and self-reliance are inborn with most infants born in nature. Many animals are born already knowing instinctively how to move, how to eat, and more importantly, how to survive. Some animals, usually mammals, may require further instruction from their parents, but they’re usually ready to go by themselves by age 3.
This isn’t the case for human babies. If anything, human babies have the longest maturity period of any creature on Earth. They need all the help they can get from day one.
Only a week old, Emma cannot feed herself. She relies on her mother for that. She cannot hold her head up; she relies on us to keep her head propped up. She cannot change herself or clothe herself. It will be months before she learns to sit up, crawl, stand, walk, and talk. It will be years before she can get to a place where she can support herself completely separately from her mother and I: financially, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Frequent readers of this blog will know that I believe that most things in this world are designed to point us towards God. I believe there is nowhere that this is the most true and most implicit than our need for others. It is clearly apparent to me that we all are not meant, to paraphrase John Donne, to be lonely, isolated islands. Indeed, our very existence as humans begins as a relational moment between two people. Our dependence and reliance on others only grows from there. Upon conception, our physical needs are taken care of in an intimate, inner relationship in which we are literally tethered to our mothers. After birth, once that physical tether is broken, we are still reliant on others to tend to every single need we have, whether it is physical, like food, or emotional, like feelings of security. We develop an outer physical tether to those who take care of us.
As we get older and begin to start assuming responsibility for ourselves and our own needs, we still need friends, lovers and families to provide a tether to a community in which our physical, emotional and spiritual needs are met in varying levels. No matter how old we get, we never outgrow our need for relationships.
When I look at Emma’s little hands and feet and hold them in my hands, I can’t help but imagine that is exactly what God does with our hands and feet. As we get older and gain our independence, one of the traps that we fall into is that we think we don’t need God any more.
The truth is that we will never outgrow our need for God. He is the one who created us, He is the one who sustains us, and, indeed, He is the one that calls us to have a relationship with, not only others, but with Him, too. He has built a spiritual tether to each and every one of us. We need Him, whether or not we realize it, to provide for us in every way imaginable, in the same ways we provide for our own children.
May God help us to understand and rely on Him more and more in every passing day.
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Tethered
February 25, 2015
Devotionals
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Matt
As adults, I think it’s so easy to forget where we came from. We’re so used to being reliant on ourselves for everything. We feed ourselves when we are hungry; we transport ourselves to places; and we buy, get and do whatever we want. We forget that there was ever a time when we were small, mewling babes who couldn’t do a thing, especially if our lives depended on it.
It never ceases to amaze me how small infants are, especially newborns. With the recent birth of my daughter Emma, I have been reveling in her small fingers, toes, legs, arms and body when I hold her. She reminds me how helpless and precious and reliant newborns are, a fact that I had begun to forget, having an increasingly independent two-year-old roam around the house.
My wife and I enjoy watching nature documentaries. In the documentary shows about animal babies, one of the things I’ve noticed is how much instinct and self-reliance are inborn with most infants born in nature. Many animals are born already knowing instinctively how to move, how to eat, and more importantly, how to survive. Some animals, usually mammals, may require further instruction from their parents, but they’re usually ready to go by themselves by age 3.
This isn’t the case for human babies. If anything, human babies have the longest maturity period of any creature on Earth. They need all the help they can get from day one.
Only a week old, Emma cannot feed herself. She relies on her mother for that. She cannot hold her head up; she relies on us to keep her head propped up. She cannot change herself or clothe herself. It will be months before she learns to sit up, crawl, stand, walk, and talk. It will be years before she can get to a place where she can support herself completely separately from her mother and I: financially, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Frequent readers of this blog will know that I believe that most things in this world are designed to point us towards God. I believe there is nowhere that this is the most true and most implicit than our need for others. It is clearly apparent to me that we all are not meant, to paraphrase John Donne, to be lonely, isolated islands. Indeed, our very existence as humans begins as a relational moment between two people. Our dependence and reliance on others only grows from there. Upon conception, our physical needs are taken care of in an intimate, inner relationship in which we are literally tethered to our mothers. After birth, once that physical tether is broken, we are still reliant on others to tend to every single need we have, whether it is physical, like food, or emotional, like feelings of security. We develop an outer physical tether to those who take care of us.
As we get older and begin to start assuming responsibility for ourselves and our own needs, we still need friends, lovers and families to provide a tether to a community in which our physical, emotional and spiritual needs are met in varying levels. No matter how old we get, we never outgrow our need for relationships.
When I look at Emma’s little hands and feet and hold them in my hands, I can’t help but imagine that is exactly what God does with our hands and feet. As we get older and gain our independence, one of the traps that we fall into is that we think we don’t need God any more.
The truth is that we will never outgrow our need for God. He is the one who created us, He is the one who sustains us, and, indeed, He is the one that calls us to have a relationship with, not only others, but with Him, too. He has built a spiritual tether to each and every one of us. We need Him, whether or not we realize it, to provide for us in every way imaginable, in the same ways we provide for our own children.
May God help us to understand and rely on Him more and more in every passing day.
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