A Lenten Devotion by Rick Seaholm
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
1 Corinthians 13:11
I remember it well. June 5, 1997. My nephew, whom I’d hoped for a few weeks earlier (on my 20th birthday), was to be born at any minute. My sister spent the night at the hospital and I spent the night recording television shows I thought might be of historical interest years later. (The joke was on me in 2018 when I found that VHS video cassette not exactly the gift a Digital Native would covet for his 21st birthday!)
Eight years later, Nicola and I were semi-settled in New Jersey when his baby sister came into the world. That summer during one of those reflective periods around the camp fire I blurted out “I think it’s time we move back home.” It was as if that was all Nicola had ever wanted to hear.
The years ahead allowed us to see both “our” kids develop into the mature people we know them to be currently. We understand that the ways in which we interact with them have changed out of necessity over the years. Their sports, jobs, social lives, and other interests coupled with our own increasingly complicated lives have made weekly visits completely impractical.
It might be tempting to rue that loss; it can be scary to lose something that had always been there. But it can’t be confused with a different, legitimate, type of “loss”. I’m twenty and almost thirty years older than these “kids”. When I’m sixty years old, I don’t want to be sitting on their mother’s couch with them every week; it just wouldn’t make sense! Who would possibly crave for them that marker of inaction?
Instead, we have come to interact with, and appreciate, them each very differently than when we would have when they’d visit us in New Jersey over a decade ago. How so? Well, this past fall, the thirteen-year-old needed money and I needed cheap labor. Check out my Norwegian round wood pile!
This past summer, the nephew was coming upon his 21st birthday. Says I, “this is an experiential birthday and I know you’re not into going out drinking all night, I’m taking you to a night of playing billiards and eating poorly!”
It went so well, we repeated for Christmas. As we shot balls, enjoyed nachos and a few ciders, we actually conversed as adults, talking about relationship, our jobs, and our health, not just of the usual YouTube videos we’d busied ourselves with in his youth. With each of them, I’ve worked to ensure that we grow together!
God, help us to see opportunity for growth where others might see only loss of what was. Amen