Reflecting on Life with Lucy

It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years since God brought Lucy into our life. Three years of joy and exhaustion and recalibrated plans about life. As I reflect on those three “features” of life with Lucy, here are some lessons I’m learning, in no particular order:

  • Sometimes – often – a mom won’t get a Sabbath rest, and rejuvenating time with God, unless dad makes it happen for her. Many women – my wife included – can get run down, not because they’re “trying to do it all”, but because they’re not being loved well in this way by their husband. It’s just as important for me to put spiritual food in her heart as it is to put food on the table.
  • God is more concerned with our faith than our comfort, with our rest in Him than our physical rest, with our reliance on His Word than on our abilities to do life on our own. Comfort in free time, rest from toil, and self-ability: those all have false gospels attached to them, which are so easy to fall into. But the true, simple gospel cures each one.
  • There seems to be no bottom to my self-centeredness. Nor you. Don’t believe me? Have another kid.
  • Sometimes there is just no time or opportunity for pristine devotions that one can post on Instagram. In these seasons God intends for us to live on gospel truths stored up in our internal cellar long in the past. When that season passes, it makes it more urgent to restock the cellar.
  • “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Heb. 13:8) When life throws you a curve ball, you might have to move to dodge the pitch. But Jesus has not moved. The challenge of faith is to believe this, over the circumstances which seem to never stop coming at you.
  • When we fail to believe and sin, well, Jesus died for that too. But that’s hard to believe sometimes. We need to hear it from wise friends, who don’t excuse our sin, but who don’t crush us with it either – friends who grieve but who then tell us the gospel back to us, and restore us.
  • “Lucy” means light. A child can shine light on idols you didn’t know you had. But God does this to produce in us a more profound submission to Him, a more sincere humility, so that our taste for Him would ripen, so that our joy in Him would deepen. God’s goal is our joy.