16
In my dad’s garage are stashed a few items that would be of little significance to anyone else but that mean the world to him. One of them is a charred license plate.
“This,” he’s told me, “represents the day God saved me and my family.”
The blackened license plate was removed from a 1977 Cadillac Seville. The driver was my youthful mother, heavily pregnant with me, her firstborn. Only a half mile from our farmhouse, she’d yielded at the intersection. But it was summer. The field of Midwest corn stretched green and high. Another car was charging through, somewhere around the posted 55 miles per hour.
The impact sent her car into the opposite field. Stunned but still the steady, keen-thinking mom I would come to know, she heaved from the car both herself and a friend’s foster infant she’d been watching.
When she stepped away, the car exploded in flames.
“In that moment,” my dad told me, “God saved my whole family.”
He explained that the Israelites made a monument to remind themselves of the miracle God accomplished in their midst, guiding them through the rippling Jordan on dry ground. Each tribe selected a large stone to contribute: “When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD…So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever” (Joshua 4:6-7 ESV).
A license plate. This is one of my family’s monuments.
Some days of parenting hit us at 55 miles per hour, spinning us around, leaving us bruised. Some flay us open, making us bloody and bewildered. And yet, God can’t seem to help himself—he constantly creates small and large acts of salvation in us and our kids.
These moments—even those that leave us limping—we need to keep.
Like when John turns to me at night and relays evidence that our son’s heart is changing. Or when I opened an e-mail telling of a scholarship to a writer’s conference, in which God seemed to whisper, You have a future and a purpose here too. Or licking coconut cream pie and chili from my lips at my in-laws’ after John baptized two of our kids. Or thumbing through journal entries—some with exclamation points, some with small, round water stains—both of which remind me that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).
For in all the stones (or license plates) we collect in parenting, “who is a rock, except our God?” (Psalm 18:31 ESV). My “faith stones” bring to mind a Zulu song roughly translated, “God, you have walked with us this whole way.”
So let’s train our eyes to see God working steadily around us, from the child who remembers to say thank you—or flush the toilet—to the painstakingly slow ways God is changing our kids in seasons where our heart twists like a dishrag. After all, “the eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light” (Matthew 6:22 ESV).
Let’s be wakeful and present to God’s activity among us, like Moses asking God to show his glory.
I welcome your love for my kids and for me. I acknowledge this is from you, that every good and perfect gift I enjoy comes from a good God (James 1:17). Your power is here and breathtaking.
This is what we celebrate as parents. What we remember. Because loss never gets the last word in the Bible.
God does.
Prayer of the Dependent Parent
Lord, I need the eyes of my heart enlightened (Ephesians 1:18). I want to see you, to see your glory. I want to show that glory to my kids and celebrate all the ways we see you working around us. Let us cultivate fun and gratitude and delight because we’re your kids.
I believe you complete every good work you begin (Philippians 1:6). Show me how to work alongside you effectively to raise these kids—and to leave the results in your hands. Be welcomed, famed, and remembered in my family until we can ultimately celebrate with you forever.
