The Best Choice: Bringing Christ into Our Decision-Making
I don’t remember much about registering for baby gear, but I remember crying. What was intended to be an exciting afternoon with my husband turned into a near panic attack. As if carrying a child with an eternal soul in my womb was not weighty enough, I was assaulted with hundreds of secondary and tertiary questions. Disposable or cloth diapers? If disposable, which brand? Pacifier or no pacifier? If yes, which brand? Three hours later, we walked out of a giant superstore far less confident and far more overwhelmed as soon-to-be parents.
I wish I could tell you the decisions declined after the infant and toddler years, but they did not. In fact, they seemed to become far weightier. I remember older mothers asking me about our future schooling decisions when our sons were two and three. At the time, I could barely handle the choice of whether to cut the grapes into fourths or four-hundredths to prevent them from choking at the next meal.
In a culture already dizzied by choice, mothers feel the increased weight of increasing decisions. Homeschool, public school, private school, or hybrid kindergarten? Club soccer, Suzuki method violin, chess or Kumon math lessons at age five? Social commentators have even coined the term “the rug rat race” to describe the intensity of the decision-making parents face even in the earliest years.
Even those who have fought hard to streamline and simplify life cannot escape from the heavy decisions that accompany parenting. At what age do we invite our children into the realities of the world around them? When and how do we introduce technology and talk about human sexuality?
I’m exhausted from simply remembering the onslaught of choices we have navigated as parents for nearly fifteen years. And I did not have nearly as many options as mothers do today. In such a dizzying parenting culture, we need a fixed point to keep us from vertigo. In a sea of advertisements pointing to the next right thing, we desperately need to remember the one thing that’s truly needful.
One Thing Needful
In Luke 10, Martha was not zipping around in her SUV to Target, Trader Joe’s, and the public library, but she knew about being worried and confused about many things. As one of Jesus’s dearest friends, she cared deeply about making choices that honored God and served him. She found herself in her own culturally-derived frenzy preparing a meal for Jesus as an honored guest.
There were grapes to tread into wine, grain to grind, meat to marinate, and water to collect. Though thousands of years and hundreds of technologies separate her from us, we share frazzled, busy hearts.
Jesus tenderly and directly says to us what he said to her: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary” (Luke 10:41-42). The Greek word merimnaó, translated “anxious,” literally means divided into parts, pulled in many directions, or pulled into pieces. What an apt description of how modern mothers feel in the present culture! I cannot tell you how many times I have found myself crying in the school pick-up line, worried about an impending parenting choice.
Similarly, the Greek word thorubos, translated “troubled,” comes from a root word which literally means a noisy upheaval and emotions spun out of control. Even in a silent car, my mind throbs with decisions and the various voices desiring to influence me in each of those crucial decisions.
Jesus’s loving rebuke to Martha’s dizzying anxiety grounded her and continues to ground us: “But one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42).
I imagine Jesus grabbing her before she spun off to complete another seemingly necessary task and coaxing her distracted gaze to his. Physical touch. Gentle, but firm tone. A moment of clarity in the midst of the haze.
One thing is necessary. And it is not even a thing. It is a person.
He is my great necessity. He is your necessity. He is our children’s great necessity, whether they are infants, toddlers, tweens, or teens. The thing that they need more than the best school or the best teacher or the best language program is to know Christ. And they will be best pointed to him when our lives are centered (and constantly re-centered) around him.
I know this. You know this. But we forget. And we get pulled into the vortex of anxiety around parenting. We begin to believe that our child needs something or someone other than or in addition to our Christ. When we forget, we are invited back to a trusting, learning, listening posture, just as was Martha.
We can bring our baskets of concerns and choices to his feet. We can invite him, first, into our hearts, and then into our choices. We can confess all the peripheral (though significant) concerns that have become primary.[1] We can bring our children into his presence and ask for his insight into their lives. We can admit that we lack wisdom and ask for him to give us his infinite wisdom.[2] We can lay out the choices with which we are wrestling and set them on the backdrop of his providential care.[3] We can walk away with renewed faith that our God loves our kids far more than we do. And then we can wake up and do it again tomorrow.
The choices are unrelenting. Their consequences grow in weight. But the God we serve pursues us and our children with unrelenting love and offers us both the eternal weight of glory!
[1] Isaiah 26:13
[2] James 1:5
[3] Romans 8:28
