I was holding my newborn son early in the morning. As I rocked him back and forth and fed him with a bottle, I felt God’s wisdom gently fall upon me.
Each morning as a father, I would hear my son’s cries, pick him up, cradle him, and nourish him.
He is my first priority. I care for his needs before first light. But there are times I am tired and frustrated, and my care for him comes from a place of duty and not from gratitude.
It struck me that God loves us like this. But it is never begrudgingly. He desires us to cry out to Him first thing in the morning. He will reach out to us and cradle us in His arms. And He will do so all day long.
I am only flesh and blood, and my arms tire after a time of holding my son. I put him down. But God picks us up and holds onto us all day long. He wants to feed us, to nourish us through His Word and Spirit.
The rite of passage of fatherhood is both helping me understand how God loves as a Father to me and how I can love Him as a child of the One True King.
How often do we neglect to call out to Him?
We “mature” in our faith and reach a plateau where we forget the goodness of the milk of life.
We enter our “teenage” years of our faith and act as if we know better, and can follow Jesus on our own.
We stop crying out.
We forget how to be a child and look up at Him with big eyes.
We cloud our ears with other voices and no longer are drawn to His voice.
The voice that called out to us when we were in infancy; that we finally recognized and accepted as our LORD and SAVIOUR.
When we wake up in the morning, are we crying out to God our Father for nourishment, or picking up our idol phones for validation and self-gratification?
May our faith have the energy of a newborn child, continually crying out to their parents!
May we only find solace in the arms of our heavenly Father and not in our sinful nature!
“So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” 1 Peter 2:1-3