Parents, Come and Rest in the Fatherhood of God

For many years I lived in a state of perpetual hand-wringing over at least one (if not all three) of my sons. At any given moment I experienced moderate to severe anxiety that their physical, emotional, relational, and/or spiritual health was in jeopardy—and it was up to me to do something about it. 

Standing vigilant against all threats coming from inside my children’s sinful hearts and from outside in our hostile, fallen world wore me out. All my fear wore my kids out, too. My worry for them burdened them almost as much as it burdened me. 

Short and sweet and profoundly comforting, Psalm 131 helps me deal with all that anxiety. 

Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up;

My eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

Too great and marvelous for me (v.1).

Psalm 131

As a mother, I am prone to:

  • Magical thinking: I know what my child needs, and I know how to get it for him. Therefore, I am willing to spend thousands of dollars on pitching lessons because in order to have the future he should have, he should at least play high school ball and probably college ball, too. (Unless he can get scholarships for academics… I’d probably better get him some tutoring too.)
  • Future forecastingI can see where my child is headed, and I am going to do what I can to direct his path. You see, if my child does not make the baseball team, his college resume will be weak, plus he will not have any friends. Or any sense of community. He will probably become depressed. And smoke pot. And on it goes. 
  • Mind-reading: I know my child inside and out, and I know what he is thinking. So when he is quiet, my internal bloodhound is on the scent for trouble. He’s hiding something. He’s unhappy. Someone was mean to him. He’s about to go off the rails. 

These are just a few of the ways I play god in my child’s life. I am “occupying myself with things too great and marvelous for me.” I operate as if I am omniscient and omnipotent, and tracking him on a cellphone allows me near omnipresence. It’s no wonder I cannot I find a place of rest and trust in God when I am busy trying to manage my child’s life.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul

Like a weaned child with its mother

Like a weaned child is my soul within me (v.2).

Psalm 131

When I first read verse 2, I wonder how in the world I am supposed to feel calm and quiet when pick-my-pet-worry-of -the-moment looms large in my mind. If I could calm and quiet my soul on my own, Lord knows I would have done it. But I can’t get to that weaned-child place without him.

Any nursing mother (and her husband) knows that before a child is weaned, she can be quite demanding and fussy in her mother’s arms until she is allowed to eat. By contrast, a weaned child has endured the frustration of being denied mother’s milk as her parents replace it with the solid food she requires to grow. The weaned child has learned to trust that mom and dad will meet her needs. She can burrow into her mother’s warm, strong arms and wait there without demanding that she get what she wants in her time, in her way. Newly confident that her parents are reliable, she doesn’t reach for her mother out of need, but simply because she wants to bask in mom’s affection as she waits to receive. 

This is where God wants to take us, as his children: to a place of unshakable trust that he will give our children what they need, when they need it. A place where the peace that passes understanding—the peace of faith—will calm and quiet a parent’s anxious soul (Phil. 4:7).

Note that this verse gives me some agency; “I have calmed and quieted my soul…” Asking for help from the Holy Spirit, I pray God will show me where I am placing my hopes for my child. 

O Israel, hope in the Lord

From this time forth and forevermore (v.3). 

Psalm 131

Everything changes when a parent hopes in the Lord instead of hoping in good behavior, good performance, and good relationships. To be sure, we want all those things for our children. We pray diligently for temporal needs and blessing. But there is so much more to hope for!  

We pray that God will pursue our children, adopt them as his own, and bring them to salvation. We hope that he will finish what he starts in their hearts, accomplishing the lifelong task of conforming our children to the image of Christ. We pray that he will use their sin, their suffering, and their struggles, redeeming every bit of what happens to them and even the poor choices they make. We hope he will do these things for his glory and for the blessing of his children, our children. 

And then we trust that God keeps his promises. I know, that’s the hard part. It’s so easy for me to type those words, so impossible for me to do without God working that trust in me by the power of his Spirit. 

In Mark’s Gospel we find the story of a father who brings his child to Jesus. The boy has long been afflicted by an evil spirit that threatens both his life and his sanity. The disciples have not been able to cast the demon out, so the father says to Jesus, “… if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us” (Mark 9: 22).

That’s about as weak a prayer as you can find: IF you can do anything, have some compassion, Jesus. But this prayer is also honest, desperate, full of love for his child, and full of hope that Jesus really just might be as loving and as powerful as this little family needs him to be. When Jesus responds that “all things are possible for one who believes,” the father immediately cries out, “I believe! Help my unbelief!”

I love that this story is about a father, because God knows how desperately parents love their children. He does not need us to be gods for our children, he only wants parents to remember we are his children too. We come to God confessing our weakness and asking for the faith to believe he will be good to our children. Then, like that weaned child, we come to him to enjoy his loving presence and wait expectantly for him to meet our children where they are.

Our hope for our children lies in the goodness of God our Father, who gave up his Son to make us his own (Rom. 8:18, 32) . What sweet relief we find in learning to trust in him alone.

Join us for the Rooted Parent Panel “Parenting Out of the Rest of the Gospel” at our conference in Dallas, October 24-26!

Anna Meade Harris is the Senior Director of Content at Rooted, co-host of the Rooted Parent podcast, and the author of God's Grace for Every Family: Biblical Encouragement for Single Parent Families and the Churches That Seek to Love Them Well (Zondervan, 2024), winner of Christianity Today's 2024 Book Award in the Marriage, Family, and Singleness category. She and her husband Tom are members of Church of the Cross in Birmingham, AL. Anna enjoys gardening, great books, running, hiking, ice cream, and spending as much time as possible with her three grown sons. She wants to live by a mountain stream in Idaho someday.

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