Seven angels, four kids, one family

Husband: Sweetie, are you okay?
Wife: Yes, sir. I’m fine.
Husband: You look tired. Come sit with me for a bit.
Wife: Yes, sir. {sits rigidly on the couch beside her spouse.}
Husband puts his arm around her and she continue to sit rigidly.
Husband: You’re very tense.
Wife: I’m fine, sir.
Husband: Are you angry at me?
Wife: No, sir. I love you dearly.
Husband kisses her, and she turns to him. “Would you like me to perform my wifely duty now, sir?”

Would you say the above is a solid marriage? What about a similar relationship between God and a human soul?

If you recall, on Wednesday we talked about the younger son from the prodigal son parable, and whether he accepted his father’s forgiveness. On Thursday, we talked about forgiving yourself.

When I whirl those two ideas together in my cuisinart brain, I end up with two models of service to God. The first is the sonship model, the one we hear about most often. It looks like this:

Person: Father, I love you, and I need some help.
God: Tell me all about it. I love you too and I want what’s best for you.
Person: {proceeds to lay out the details of his concerns.}

Then there’s this model:

Person: Father, I love you, and I need some help. My son is having problems at school, so what I’m going to do is speak to the teacher, spend dedicated time with him doing his homework, and get him a new organizer. And what I want you to do is {blah blah blah}.
God: Hello?

This model I’ve taken to calling “transactionalism,” and I’d gotten trapped in it. What I’d done was emulate a business model.

In business, relations are supposed to be transactional. A good administrative assistant would say, “Pat, the copier stopped working. I looked for paper jams, changed the toner, restarted it, and checked all the connections. It won’t work on manual or automatic feed. I’d like permission to call the copier repairguy.”

God, I’ve discovered, doesn’t like that so much. He wants you to come into His office and say, “It says paper jam when there is no paper jam.” And then wait.

It feels irresponsible of me not to come to God with the solution in hand to the problem. But of course, God knows how to solve our problems. He wants us to be sons and daughters, not direct reports.

I think sometimes that’s why we get answers to prayers that then don’t work out. Because God wants us to see that we had a good idea, but we shouldn’t dictate what He does.

I also had quite a bit of the model at the top: I show up and do what God wants and sit rigid, trying to anticipate whatever He wants next, and keeping it in terms of what I should do for Him. Again, not good. It not only keeps God at arm’s length, but it’s the full realization of the “hired hand” mentality. It’s the assumption that God doesn’t want us to get close to Him. Or that God can’t stand getting close to us.

Even more, it’s the assumption that I can repay God for what He’s given me, or at the very least stay out of debt. That’s a kind of autonomy that’s impossible to maintain, and it’s an impediment. I’m trying to deserve what I have.

I’ve recently changed my model of requesting-prayer (and it’s tough to keep with it) to just telling God what the problem is. And waiting. Because sometimes I’ve felt pushed a bit to keep talking about why I think something is a problem, or what I’m afraid of. And when I’ve outlined it (in list form) I’ve felt God answering in some instances that what I thought was a problem wasn’t as big as I thought.

(Mental prayer, for some reason, is all waiting and listening. I can do that fine. But I can’t ask for help without the impulse to tell God what He needs to do.)

It’s hard to let go of the transaction-based mentality: I give you this and you give me that. Or even, I’m going to just sit here, small and terrified, and wait for the rejection. Instead God likes it as “You spend time with me, and I spend time with you.” For me, this is a paradigm shift, and it’s tough to stick with it.

A young mom needs prayers, if you don’t mind. She’s the wife of my Patient Husband’s gamer friend (they play SFB together when they get a chance.) She’s been battling some form of cancer for a while now, and recently took a turn for the worse.

Please pray for her. She has two children close in age to my oldest two, and this has to be devastating for the family. She sounds upbeat and it does sound as if she’s doing better now, but I’m scared for her when I think about it.

May the healing of the Holy Spirit fill her body and soul, and may God grant the family comfort and peace as they continue to struggle against her illness.

Parable: the prodigal son. Today we take on the younger son.

We always hear about the older son because the parable ends with him not yet responding to his father. Jesus frames the parable in such a way that we the listeners seem to be invited to identify with the older: does he accept that his father has forgiven his younger brother?

Allow me to turn the tables: what about the younger brother? Does he accept his father’s forgiveness of him? Does he accept sonship again, or does he continue to treat himself as one of his father’s hired hands? Does he keep his distance? Or does he humble himself enough to give up the last vestiges of control by saying, “Yes, I screwed up, but I’ll accept that you love me damaged”?

Does he allow his father to treat him like a son again? Honestly, we don’t know. That’s not clear in the parable. Both sons’ responses are missing.

Because there’s that sense of pride that can make us think we’re unforgivable and so we never forgive ourselves. To continue to l,ive as one of the father’s servants would allow the younger son to feel he deserves what he has — a home and food — whereas accepting the role of being a returned son means accepting that he doesn’t deserve waht he has. Accepting that to his father, who he is is more important than what he does. That he could never earn the love he receives.

That’s a hard thing because it keeps him in a perpetual debt of a different kind. At that point, his only value is the value his father places on him, even though arguably he’ll work for his father (since his older brother was working in the fields.)

It’s not easy for either son, is my point. We know the father told him not to live as a servant; we don’t know if the son accepted this and returned to live like a son.

Two follow-up posts on the Prodigal Son:

Self-forgiveness & the prodigal
Son versus the hired hand