This is a follow-up to this entry: Sallie’s Sabbatical Insights (So Far…). I’d like to get back to my regularly scheduled programming here on TTL, but I guess until I get a few of these things off my chest and off my mind, I can’t get back to what I normally do here. So bear with me.

I wrote about people who have pet issues on secondary matters of the Christian faith and how they judge everybody by their pet issue. Related to this is the tendency to overreact about secondary issues and swing too far to the other side. By this I mean that in their zeal to speak out biblically about the sin and waywardness of our culture, people swing too far in the other direction.

I could list many examples such as.:

• the current trend toward “hooker” and “desperate housewives” dressing so everybody should dress in dresses only and preferably baggy dresses/jumpers that hide every God-created curve on a woman’s body.
• the abomination of abortion in our land so someone who considers if any kind of natural birth control to limit the size of their family is biblically admissible is deemed a terrible heretic.
• the watering down of God’s Word by endless paraphrases of little/no value so anyone who doesn’t use a KJV 1611 is a heretic.
• young women go to college (Christian or secular) and lose their faith and/or innocence so consequently Christian women shouldn’t go to college at all and should stay in their father’s home until they are married (or permanently if they never marry).

I realize there are a lot of Christians out there who are passionately concerned about the state of the church. I am one of them. It sickens me when I go to places like Slice of Laodicea and read about things such as churches making baptism kid friendly by adding scuba gear, confetti, wailing sirens, and the like.

But it also sickens me to read other Christians who seem to be swinging too far to the conservative side. For example, I know that people mean well but elevating the blessing of children to what sometimes seems to be an almost cult-like status is troubling. People won’t come out and say it, but the general impression is that if you don’t have a houseful of children running around you are cursed (or, if they are charitable, they will say you are unscriptural). Now they won’t SAY in so many words that you are cursed and, if pressed, they would indeed say that infertility is a sad occurrence and of course we should care for couples without children. But I have yet to see any conservative Christians really address the idea that perhaps God does withhold children from couples for positive reasons (for example, the health of the mother, ministry, etc.). Instead, the impression is that if you have none, one or two you are really suspect as a Christian and can’t be really serious about literal, biblical Christianity.

Taking a link to a link to a link, I found someone who had posted this poem from a well-known blogger’s site. This was the proverbial “last straw” that made me realize the time had come to write this entry.

No Children!

By Edgar Guest

No children in the house to play
It must be hard to live that way!
I wonder what the people do
When night comes on and the work is through,
With no glad little folks to shout,
No eager feet to race about,
No youthful tongues to chatter on
About the joy that’s been and gone?
The house might be a castle fine,
But what a lonely place to dine!

No children in the house at all,
No fingermarks upon the wall,
No corner where the toys are piled
Sure indication of a child.
No little lips to breathe the prayer
That God shall keep you in His care,
No glad caress and welcome sweet
When night returns you to your street;
No little lips a kiss to give
Oh, what a lonely way to live!

No children in the house! I fear
We could not stand it half a year.
What would we talk about at night,
Plan for and work with all our might,
Hold common dreams about and find
True union of heart and mind,
If we two had no greater care
Than what we both should eat and wear?
We never knew love’s brightest flame
Until the day the baby came.

And now we could not get along
Without their laughter and their song.
Joy is not bottled on a shelf,
It cannot feed upon itself,
And even love, if it shall wear,
Must find its happiness in care;
Dull we’d become of mind and speech
Had we no little ones to teach.
No children in the house to play!
Oh, we could never live that way!

So according to this poem, couples who have not been blessed with children (like David and me) are sure to become dull of mind and speech, must be lonely because they only have the two of them at the dinner table, must have no goals or anything to work towards, and must just sit in the evening like two bumps on a log and stare at each other because there are no children to chase around the house or snuggle with over a story.

Well, I do have a newsflash!

Couples without children can be sharp of mind and speech, enjoy quiet evenings at home with each other (and other people), and enjoy working toward many goals. But when people who advocate having many children post a poem like this in their zeal to stand against the culture and stand for their understanding of the Scriptures, do they think about what they are saying about people who don’t have children?

Please don’t take this the wrong way. I love children. I love newborn babies best of all when they lay like a dead weight on your chest as you hold them. It is one of the sweetest feelings in the world. But guess what? Children are not the end-all of life, even for the Christian. But it certainly seems that in an effort to speak out against the ills of our society regarding abortion and the disregard for raising children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, that a lot of conservative Christians are going too far and making parenthood out to be of (almost) the same importance as salvation!

One of the great things about our marriage is that we balance each other out. I tend to err on the side of law and David tends to err on the side of grace. It is a good checks and balances system God has arranged in our marriage, especially for me. I know God gave David to me to protect me from myself because I can be way too “law” oriented. My natural inclination is that if it is more conservative, it must be right. David does a better job of saying – hang on! Let’s think this through.

One of the things David has often said is that Jesus was not a liberal or a conservative in the way Christians today like to think of those terms. There are examples in the Scriptures where he made the conservatives of that time mad and other times he made the liberals mad. Jesus was Jesus, not a conservative Baptist and not a liberal Episcopalian. (And I’ve been in enough Baptist churches in my life to know that that statement is really going to bother some Baptists who read this! 🙂 ) Jesus was Jesus and I don’t think an honest reading of the Scriptures can allow us to put Him in a neat little box that fits in some of the neatly thought-out life plans being advocated today.

I don’t have all the answers to the questions I’ve raised. I just know that as a thinking Christian I am troubled by what I see going on.

The church has failed in many ways so we have emergent type folks who want to throw it all out the window and recreate practically everything. I don’t think that is the answer.

The church has failed in many ways so we have multitudes of conservative Christian ministries popping up all over the place that have the detailed, Scripture-proofed answers to everything. I don’t think this is the answer either.

The answer has to be somewhere in the middle. Not in the compromising middle because I am not advocating compromise. I am passionate about the truth of God’s Word. But I just can’t fully embrace either camp and hope that soon the Lord will move and perhaps move His church to a biblically solid, non-reactionary position. What that will look like, I don’t know. But I have to believe that it exists because none of the alternatives that are present today really seem like whole, biblical Christianity to me.

I believe part of it has to come from Christians learning how to think and be discerning. I know that there are a lot of sincere believers out there who are searching for answers. But it is funny to me that so often more conservative Christians criticize other Christians for reading every how-to book that comes down the pike (purpose driven, etc.). But I think that conservative Christians are prone to do the same thing in their search for answers. They just do it through ministries and different kinds of books that lay out Scripture-proofed arguments. But neither camp of searching Christians is really thinking or discerning. In their rush to find “an answer” they can implement in their home, they latch on to anything that sounds “right”. Maybe the difference is that, like my husband and me, some are more oriented towards grace and some towards law so they naturally gravitate either toward the “Christians” best-sellers or the top “conservative, family-oriented” teachers of the year.

Well, I’ve gotten that off my chest. David and I will continue to try to find a biblical path through this life that will probably occasionally swing left and then right of center and trust Jesus to get us through it in one piece.