Dependency

So last night as I was thinking about the fact that my wife is now pregnant with our second child, a revelation hit - God knew what he was doing! Ok, I know, that is not much of a revelation. But just hear me out on this one. Our first daughter is absolutely wonderful and full of life. She is super social and just loves to be a part of the action around her. Because of that, she does not like to sleep! In her first 13 months of life, I can think of two weeks where we had consistently good sleep most of the week. (Both came after she was a year old). All of that to say that we are exhausted a lot of the time after a year without consistent sleep. Now that Jamie is pregnant, she is even more tired, but her body just doesn't let her sleep! So while the thought of adding another child to our family is incredibly exciting, it is also pretty daunting. How are we going to manage to do this?
So this is where God comes in the picture. I was thinking last night that it would be so nice if he just made pregnancy easier on women, and if he made little kids a bit easier to raise. I man, He's God right? He can do anything he wants, so why not make that whole process a bit easier? That is when it hit me. God made things this way for a reason. I know, maybe I am just really slow, but sometimes I think to myself that God could have made things a bit more "convenient" for us if he wanted. I mean, if he had a suggestion box, I would probably add something at least weekly. So why did he design pregnancy and child raising the way it is? Well I am sure there are a plethora of wonderful reasons that I don't understand, but the one that hit me like a hammer on the thumb last night was the fact that we need each other.
The American mindset and culture values individuality and independence, but I don't think that is a value of God's. In fact, after he created Adam, he said that it was NOT GOOD that he was alone. He needed a "helper". Sure you can debate a lot about what "helper" might mean, but in my mind it means that Adam needed help! God could have made a "friend" for him, or a "competitor" or some crazy new animal that could talk an interact with him intellectually. But God knew that Adam needed help. He needed someone else to be his friend, his companion, his encouragement, his sounding board for new ideas - his helper. My point is that God made us with a need for others. There is no stage in life where this is more apparent than with a helpless little child. Even now, when Natalie can run around and explore, she is in need of so much guidance and care. So from the start, God puts us in a place of dependence upon others. The crazy thing is that sometimes we get the idea that we should "grow up" and grow out of this dependence and become independent. Yes we should do this in some ways, but God didn't create Eve to raise Adam from a baby, he created Eve to help him as an adult. It was better this way! We are created for community!
So what does this have to do with pregnancy? Well, as of last night, I think that pregnancy and raising children are meant to remind us as adults of our dependence upon others as well and our need for community. I have never felt more helpless in my life than in trying to raise a child. I have never been pregnant, but from my observation, it seems like quite a challenge in itself. Maybe if it was easy (like the suggestion I submitted to God) it would allow us to just do it on our own and not ask for help from others. While that my fit nicely with our independent American ideals, it would seem opposed to God's idea of us needing others. So my whole point is that maybe God wants these things to be challenges as a reminder that even though we are older and more capable of many things, we still need him desperately and we still need others as well.
The great challenge for all of this is that we live in a place where it takes a great deal of humility to ask for help and it is viewed as a sign of weakness many times. Even if others might like to help us, how many of us hesitate to reach out because we don't want to "be a burden" or we feel like we should be able to do it ourselves? In the end, I think my great revelation has just been a challenge to myself to realize that we need each other. Reaching out to ask for help and live in community may be foreign to how we often do things in the United States, and Admittedly it can be hard to do, but maybe it is time to accdept the fact that God made us dependent on him and on others for a reason. Believe it or not, it is good to be dependent. It is good to be connected to others. It is good to have help.
God grant us the humility and courage to reach out to others and embrace the community that we all desire so much and yet do not pursue for fear of being "weak".