“Love is something
more stern and more splendid than mere kindness… There is kindness in Love: but
Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given
above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain
fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it…
Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad,
provided only that it escapes suffering… It is for people whom we care nothing about
that we demand happiness on any terms.
“We were made not
primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God
may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest ‘well
pleased.’ … What we would here and now call our ‘happiness’ is not the end God
chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we
shall in fact be happy.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
I’ve been struggling with not acting out in anger towards my
kids, not disciplining in anger: this is a complicated issue about which I’m
learning a lot, personally and practically, but I was meditating on this
passage today.
Dave and I asked each other once, if your kid could be
really good at only three qualities, what would they be? What would the top one
be? His was kindness. He’d much rather our kids turn out kind than smart, or
successful, or pretty. And I think that comes through: we explain and make up
stories about what being kind means; we compliment them when they are. But
kindness isn’t love. Kindness is an act of consideration: you want to make
something easier for someone else. You try to think from their point of view.
Love is a commitment to someone else’s sanctification. That doesn’t always mean
something will be easier for someone else; in fact, it is often harder. That
doesn’t mean you think from their point of view, or even your point of view;
you think from God’s point of view as much as you can.
That idea first comes up in marriage: the longer we are married,
the more I realize the point of our marriage is not to make each other happy,
but to make each other more sanctified, more like Christ. The point of marriage
isn’t that romantic rush through the airport at the end of romantic comedies,
or fifty years of being able to finish each other’s sentences, but it is when
we present each other to Christ at the end of this life and the beginning of
the next. Did I make Dave more blameless? Did I help him grow?
The same is true of our kids, though I find it harder to
think this way about them. I feel more ownership of them than I do of my
husband (possibly because I popped them out of my body and then keep them alive
every day?). It is easier to think about them from my point of view: how I want
them to turn out. How they make me feel.
That leads to a selfish sort of discipline. We all know we
should discipline in love: train our children to be godly though it may cause temporary
suffering. But that can get tainted with selfish discipline: when I am actually
punishing them because what they did made me angry or upset, or ruined my plans
for the day, or caused me extra work or embarrassment, or wasn’t how I wanted
them to act. I react not because I desire their growth in godliness, but
because they’ve driven me to my emotional limit.
And that’s when it’s hard to keep control over what I say or
how I act, or over the inner ranting voice in my head.
So I guess God is showing me that my anger erupts because I
don’t always have a real heart of love for my children, in the way that C.S.
Lewis writes about love. That kind of love is not something I can manufacture
in the moment, while desperately trying to tamp down my emotions. It is a
vision and commitment that I cultivate, through regular prayer, through asking
God to help me understand his heart and desires towards my children. It’s not
focused on the immediate outcome as much as the process. It has no concern for
what I feel and want but total concern for what God feels and wants.
People talk about how marriage is a triangle: two people drawing
each other closer to God. Parenting is the same, in that that kind of love for
my kids draws me closer to God. It’s not just me trying not to yell, and my
screaming kid who won’t stop crying, both of us battling it out alone. God is
present, both to give me his heart of love for them, and to give me the desire
and power to overcome my selfish anger.
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