As Valentine’s Day approaches with its focus on all the “warm and fuzzy” aspects of romantic love and love in general, I’m moved to tackle what distinguishes our “hearts and flowers” notions about love from what real loving is.
I concluded last week’s post (“God Is a Social Being”) saying that love was the best thing life has to offer as well as the thing that God most wants for us. But what does this “real” loving entail?
In my parenting classes I used a picture of a heart to task analyze what is involved in loving our children. One side of the heart listed the characterisitics of “nurturing”: affection, listening, caregiving, and the like. I titled the other half “limit setting” – a more nuanced description of what we generally associate with disciplining. Spending time reading a book to your children, listening to their stories, and kissing their scraped knees fall in the “nurturing” category; keeping them from running into the street, denying them cookies before mealtime, and giving them consequences for misbehavior come under “limit setting.”
The point is that it takes both sides of the heart to love our children. This is how I interpret Proverbs 13:24 which reads: “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them” (NIV) and why I prefer the rendering of The Message: “A refusal to correct is a refusal to love; love your children by disciplining them.”
In my experience, the problems parents confront in trying to love their children usually stem from being better at one side of the heart than the other. Traditionally, we cast mothers in the role of nurturers and fathers as the wielders of discipline. I’m not sure how that ever actually worked satisfactorily. Clearly, mothers and fathers equally need to develop both sets of skills. In particular, diagnosing which half of the heart is your weak side helps you to see the facets of your own personality that need growth. With my children, I found nurturing easier and more pleasant. Having to grow my ability to set limits effectively, without becoming harsh or authoritarian, paid off not only in my interactions with my kids, but in all my relationships.
Still, how does this analysis of the two components of love reflect on our understanding of God loving us? Just as children crave our nurturing more than our limit setting, it’s far easier for us to draw closer to God when we find the Lord ministering to our hurts and lavishing us with solace and affection than when we find doors being closed on the things we pray for. The challenges parenting calls out in us give us a greater insight into the difficulty God has in demonstrating divine love to us. Parents don’t relish telling their children “no” when what they want will hurt them, but they must do so because they know the dangers the little ones can’t see. In the same way, the Lord must say “no” to us, even knowing that we may not really understand why.
The only thing that makes the “limit setting” aspect of love tolerable rests in the trust we have in the person saying “no.” Much of that trust is built with “nurturing.” At the end of the day being good at only one side of the heart makes our love lopsided and ineffective. Neither the “soft touch” nor the “toe the line” attitude can stand on its own over time.
Never easy, the active, in-it-for-the-long-run loving that parenting requires always mirrors the way God loves us. And it always demands the balancing of both halves of the heart.
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