As I'm recently engaged, I feel that I've been given the license to start planning in earnest for my future. To that end, my fiance and I have decided to have three kids. Obviously, we know we can't say for sure if that's the final number, but that's where we are right now. We were talking a while back about names and preferred genders (2 boys and 1 girl, please) and what we hope they'll be like. I hope I have a little boy who's just like his daddy, while he wants a little me running around. At the end of the day, though, we both know we can't control how they'll look or even, in many ways, what their personalities will be like. My fiance expressed his concern that we'll have a child he won't love as much as the others. I've heard other people say basically the same thing, but in a different way. "We're having our second baby... can I really love this one as much as our first?" So I thought about it, and told my fiance that he'll love all of his kids equally; he'll just relate to them differently. I used as an example the way he loves me. I'm really all kinds of different people, and he loves them all. He loves the sleepy me, and how silly and cuddly I get. He loves the crazy me, who wants to go outside and skip down the street and spin around for no good reason. He loves the serious me, the way I sometimes get really intense about issues. He loves all the parts of me, but he has to relate differently to each part of me. If I'm sleepy, that's not a good time to enter a serious discussion. If I'm being crazy, I wouldn't want him to try to hold me close on the couch.
It occurs to me that God does this for us, his children. God gives us exactly what we need when we need it, but I think that sometimes we get mad or jealous when he relates differently to different people. "Goood, but I wanted that!" we say with a childish whine. It reminds me of my students. Some of my students have IEPs that legally require me to do certain things for them, like give them extra time on their homework or classwork. Other students get mad because they don't get extra time too, but they don't need it! I am not allowed to say, "Well, so-and-so has a learning disability and therefore is allowed extra time." Instead, I just gently remind them to focus on themselves. In much the same way, imagine being a parent of a child with a peanut allergy. No matter how much the child begs for a sandwich just like her friends', no loving parent would EVER serve that child peanut butter and jelly, no matter how much she argues that the turkey sandwich is proof that you don't love her! If we would pay more attention to the kindness and consideration that God gives us as individuals than we do to what we think we're missing out on, we'd be much happier.
