When I had my fourth child, I had the good fortune to take a very helpful parenting class offered at my kids’ nursery school. I was so impressed with what I had learned that I studied and then taught parenting classes for the next half dozen years or so.
One of the things that occurred to me as I was teaching was how much my experience of being a parent was teaching me about God and the way the Lord loves us as a mother and father. Over the next several weeks, I plan to share some of my findings here.
The parenting course I took and taught was based on the psychology of Alfred Adler and his idea that humans are essentially “social” beings – beings who need to be in relationship with others for survival. From this premise, we would teach a lesson about “What Makes Children Tick” based on the work of Drs Amy Lew and Betty Lou Bettner. Lew and Bettner* contend that the key to good parenting rests in recognizing the “Four Crucial C’s” that all humans need to interact successfully with others. I’ve outlined them below:
1) Connection – We need people who love us unconditionally.
2) Capability – We need to have competence in useful skills, confidence in what we can do.
3) Contribution – We need to know that what we do counts, makes a positive difference to others.
4) Courage – We need coping skills for the inevitable “bumps in the road” that life brings.
While no parent can actually bestow the four C’s on a child, our awareness of these essential needs can help us create a climate in our homes that nurtures their development. Most interesting was how the course taught parents to use a child’s specific misbehaviors to help diagnose which needs were lacking. This will become clearer in the next several weeks as I discuss each of the four C’s in turn.
So how does this all relate back to God? Echoing my last post (“Good Company”) I submit that God has given us commandments not as an enforcer: “Do these things and don’t do those – or else!” but as a good parent who is setting limits to our behavior so that these four C’s for human flourishing can be cultivated.
We are social beings because God is a social being. The essence of the notion of the Trinity is that God exists in relationship: Father to Son to Holy Spirit. Even though the doctrine of the Trinitarian nature of God is specific to Christianity the Old Testament offers interesting glimmers of the relational character of God. Note the use of the plural “Let us make human beings in our own image” in Genesis 1:26. Also, Proverbs claims that God created Wisdom “before he did anything else” (Proverbs 8:22) and pictures Wisdom as the companion during God’s creative endeavors. When the Lord
and “staked out Earth’s foundations,
I was right there with him, making sure everything fit.
Day after day I was there, with my joyful applause,
always enjoying his company,
delighted with the world of things creatures,
happily celebrating the human family” (Proverbs 8:29-31 The Message).
Not only is God in relationship within the Trinity. The Bible always characterizes the Lord in terms of relationships with humans. When Moses confronts the burning bush, God greets him not with a résumé of powers and accomplishments but simply: “I am the God of your father: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6).
Unlike us God doesn’t need society for survival. God could have chosen to be God all alone. Instead, the Lord chose to create us, and to be the God who abides with us – Immanuel – literally “God-with-us” in Hebrew. The underlying message of the whole Bible is that God desires to be in relationship with us and to have us be in relationship with each other.
The reason for relationship is so that there can be love. Love can’t exist without it. When 1 John attests “God is love” he explains:
“This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God. My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. … if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!” (1 John 9-12 The Message).
Isn’t the possibility of experiencing love in all its forms the sweetest thing life can offer? This is what God wants for us.
*Amy Lew and Betty Lou Bettner describe the Four Crucial C’s in A Parent’s Guide to Understanding and Motivating Children.”
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