A lot of words have been said about parent’s love for their children, and the way that love changes them. All of that is true. What I’ve been thinking about this past week is about whether it is our love for them that changes us, or their love for us. 

When my twins were just a few hours old, all four of us, plus my mother, my mother-in-law and at least 2 or 3 medical staff were all shoved into our tiny hospital room. One of my twins was being checked over by the medical team, and I was hooked up to a dozen or so IV drips, devices, and monitors, sick and in pain from postpartum preeclampsia and a bad reaction to an anesthetic. After her check up, my fresh little baby girl was screaming and my husband, a dad of less than a day, tried to soothe her, while his mother and mother-in-law offered fountains of advice and subtly competing offered hands to take her themselves. The nurse gave my husband a subtle head gesture towards me and I offered out my hands too, however cautiously, hooked up to tubes every which way. 

My husband handed me the screaming baby, and within just two or three seconds, she quieted, stilled, tucked in towards my chest. My husband looked on in awe, shared a half-asleep half sentence, “….Like magic….” and the nurse just winked at me.¹ 

I looked at my baby girl, teeny tiny, just five pounds of scrunchy skin and razor sharp fingernails, and felt the crashing wave of knowing your whole world will never be the same. Because it was the moment that it became real that they weren’t just my babies, I was their mom. That “Mom,” and all that it means in our world – as a safe place, a last resort, a launching pad for all that you will be after, a fountain, a well, an oasis – that was a thing I became all at once, not something I grew into. To this little wrinkly, angry, fragile, perfect thing, I was already mom, I was already the safe place to land, and I hadn’t done a single thing to earn it yet. 

I’ve been thinking about how maybe it is our love for others, for our children, our community, our partners, that shapes us, and maybe, in a way we struggle to name, it is others’ love for us. We as Christian leaders believe that God’s love is at work long before we have done anything to earn it, long before we accept it. We believe, in an abstract sense, that that love calls to us, draws us closer to God, but my children have taught me that call in a much more tangible sense than I had ever imagined. It is one thing to imagine God’s prevenient love as that of an infinite being, where it costs God nothing, risks God nothing. It is something else to imagine it through the lens of a baby, infinitely loving and trusting, but with an implied responsibility to live into what is already loved in you. 

The love we receive makes us into someone that is more capable of loving others. The trust others have in us makes us more trustworthy. Love is not linear, its formative capacities are cyclical, we are shaped by others’ love just as our love shapes us. That matters for us as we think about the work of discipleship because it makes formation a communal act, not an individual one. Our work isn’t to love others with sort of a placid, detached, evenness, but with a space for them to grow into, and an expectation to cheer for them as they do. 

This week, notice: 

Where in your world are you being met with love before you have “earned” it? What have those places formed in you? Who do they make you strive to be? Who has been cheering you on? 

Where can you meet others with more love than they deserve? Where can you find opportunities to call people into the versions of themselves that they will need your love and support to achieve? How can we treat them as though they’ve already succeeded?

1. Apparently, I am not alone in this experience. Michelle Wolf has a great bit about it, but *WARNING* strong, non-church-approved language! Here’s the clip! ↩︎