I Think I Am Robbing My Children

You have decided what has to go and you have been carrying it around like a theft.

It is not a theft. But the feeling is not milder than that, and I am not going to insult you by using a smaller word for it than the one you are actually using in your own head at eleven at night.

What is going on in there is roughly this. There is a version of this day that your children have had before, and you are about to give them a smaller one, and somewhere in the future there is a grown adult who says: that was the year when.

That is the fear. Not that they will be disappointed on the day. Almost every mother could survive an afternoon of disappointment. It is that something will be missing from what they carry.

Let me put a question beside that, and it is a real one rather than a reassurance.

What do you actually remember from being eight?

Not what you have been told. What is actually in there. And I would guess, because it is what nearly everybody finds, that it is almost entirely small and almost entirely unplanned. A smell. A person laughing at something. The particular quality of a room. A thing that went wrong.

Almost nobody remembers the scale of anything.

The life is more than meat

There is a line of Jesus about anxiety that is more useful than the more famous verses around it.

The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment. (Luke 12:23, King James Version)

More than meat. He is making a comparison of size. The life, whatever a life is, is the larger thing, and the provisions are the smaller thing inside it.

And notice who He is talking to. Not comfortable people who need to be reminded not to be greedy. He is talking to a crowd who genuinely did not know where the next thing was coming from, and He is telling them that the supply and the life are not the same size.

That is a sentence for a mother about to give a smaller version of something.

You are able to hold that the life is the larger thing, and it is written into Luke 12:23 as a comparison rather than as a comfort. The written word makes the provision the smaller item inside a life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact you can act on rather than a nice sentiment about simplicity.

And He does not say the meat does not matter.

You were never told that what a household provides is nothing, and Luke 12:23 says more than rather than instead of. Scripture keeps the provision real and puts it in proportion, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a mother from swinging to the opposite error and pretending the smaller day costs nothing at all.

Where the memory actually forms

Now let me be practical about children and memory, because there is an assumption running underneath this that is not true and it is doing damage.

The assumption is that memory records the scale of things. It does not. Memory records the intense, the odd, the repeated and the emotionally loaded, and scale is almost never any of those.

Ask any group of adults about a childhood day and you get: the year the dog got in, the thing an uncle said, being allowed to stay up, a particular chair, somebody crying and then everybody laughing. You will wait a very long time to hear anybody describe the quantity of anything.

What does get remembered, reliably and heavily, is atmosphere. Whether the adults were tense. Whether their mother was in the room or somewhere else being exhausted. Whether it felt safe.

You have been protecting the thing that does not get recorded, and the written word puts the life above the provision by name. Luke 12:23 makes that comparison plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a mother where a memory is actually being laid down.

And here is the arithmetic that follows, and it is uncomfortable in a useful direction. A bigger day made by a flattened mother is worse, on the measure that actually records, than a smaller day made by a present one.

That is not a consolation. It is a straight trade and you have been making it in the wrong direction for years, in good faith, out of love.

You were never robbing them by being in the room, and Scripture is entirely clear about which of the two is the larger thing. Luke 12:23 puts the life first, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with a mother who has been protecting the wrong item.

Ask them, and do not correct it

So here is the assignment, and it is a question rather than a decision.

Ask one of your children what they remember about last year, and do not correct the answer.

Just that. Ask, and listen, and whatever comes out, let it stand.

You are able to ask a question you do not control the answer to, and it has never once required you to fill in what they leave out. Luke 12:23 puts the life above the supply, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a mother in the two seconds after a child answers.

And I want to prepare you for what usually happens, because it catches people.

They will name something small. Something unplanned, unnoticed at the time, and possibly not even in your own memory. There is a fair chance it will be something that went wrong. There is an even chance it will be a thing that caused you some embarrassment at the time.

And almost none of the things you spent the money and the hours on will be in the list.

That will be uncomfortable for about four seconds and then it will be the most freeing thing anybody has said to you this autumn. Do not correct it. Do not remind them of the big thing. Do not say: what about when we. That converts an honest answer into a test they have failed, and it will be the last honest answer you get.

You are getting real information rather than the answer you were hoping for, and the written word never once measures a life by the size of the provision. Luke 12:23 makes the comparison in six words, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a mother hears what actually landed.