Through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
Romans 5.19
Beloved son,
There is a hilarious scene in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 where two of our imprisoned heroes ask Baby Groot, the sapling tree-thing, to fetch an item that is crucial to their escape. They need to retrieve a device from their captors’ sleeping chambers, and they tell Baby Groot exactly what it is (Yondu’s fin) and just where to find it. Baby Groot listens intently, trots away, sneaks into the room full of sleeping brutes, locates the drawer Yondu and Rocket had described, and returns with a big smile on his face carrying…a pair of underwear.
Dismayed, Yondu and Rocket try to explain what they need in even simpler terms and send Baby Groot on his way again. This time he seems sure he has gotten it right, only to come back lugging a squirming alien lizard.
The shtick carries on, with Yondu and Rocket’s exasperation swelling and Baby Groot’s failings becoming more and more outrageous: he brings back a prosthetic eye, a desk, eventually a severed toe. When Yondu hands Baby Groot a small medallion and tells Groot that the desk he is seeking has the same symbol on it, Baby Groot eyes the medallion carefully…and then puts it on his head as if it’s a hat.
When at last Baby Groot gets to the sleeping chambers and finds the desk drawer that matches the medallion, spots Yondu’s fin, smiles triumphantly, reaches in…and pulls out a tin of candy.
You are such a Baby Groot right now. Other than the fact that you can’t grow your limbs at will, so much in that scene captures who you are this stage of life. If you got caught up with a band of star-trekking misfits, you would do pretty much exactly what Baby Groot would do (sans the toe fiasco—yikes!). Treating objects as hats and getting sidetracked by sweet and/or shiny stuff—these are classic toddler antics.
But what that scene embodies especially well is that charming quality that comes about when you mix your eagerness to help with your partial understanding of what we mean. Like Groot, you are often eager to listen, eager to carry out instruction, and eager to show off all you know and can do. In your own way, you are actually quite helpful sometimes. If we are lazing on the couch and want our cell phone from across the room, we know just the little man to recruit. If you spill your drink, we don’t just wipe it up anymore; we give you a napkin and you do it yourself. Three of your favorite activities right now are washing dishes, sweeping the floor, and—as if you’re competing for Yelp reviews—pulling off our socks at the end of the day. We could have named you Cosette!
Also like Groot, though, you don’t necessarily receive the full message of what we’re saying. You almost always get part of the story, but rarely all the details.
A few weeks ago, I noticed a bottle of body wash sitting in the laundry basket in our bedroom. I held it up to Mom and she just laughed. That afternoon, she had enlisted your help with clean-up, giving you specific instructions like “put your books on the shelf” and “put this shirt in your room.” Because you had brought the bottle of soap into the kitchen earlier that day,[1] Mom had told you to put the soap back in the tub. We didn’t see the results of your work until bedtime when, voilà!, there it was in the laundry basket. You got the gist, to be sure, but was it all that helpful? Well, about as helpful as a pair of underwear in a jailbreak.
This eagerness to help and listen and show off what you can do, all while coming into greater but sometimes quite limited understanding of what we are asking of you—these two elements converge to form a picture of what I can only call obedience. When you were younger, Mom and I didn’t much think about this idea of obedience. You certainly didn’t, either. So much of your first year of life was about survival and adaptation—learning to eat, sleep, and move about the world. By and large, when you cried you were expressing need, not exerting will.
Not so in your second year of life and now—would you please take your finger off the fast-forward button?—starting your third. Just as your efforts to help are expressions of obedience, you are also exploring different ways of exerting your own will against ours. Alongside the washed dishes and returned soap bottles and fetched phones, you have started to develop a rich and colorful vocabulary of disobedience.
In words, this lexicon is tiny: “no” suffices in almost all cases and, to our chagrin, has become a recent favorite. In non-verbals, however, you have many ways to communicate your rebellion. You can shake your head vigorously, or resonate an extra-long “nnnnn” before the “no,” or throw something, or turn your head away as if you can’t hear us,[2] or cry, or run away, or, best yet, run away crying.
But the reasons for crying now must be so much more complex than they used to be. What was once “I need food!” might now be “I want food but not the food you are offering me and even if I did accept it, I would obviously want to open it myself.” What was once “I am hot” might now be “I told you I didn’t want to go to the grocery store and I might have been cool as a cucumber—ooh, cucumber!—but hey, stop trying to distract me, because you put on my socks when I clearly wanted to wear my sandals, and now my feet are going to catch fire and my shirt is itchy and yup, I think you did it, now I am going to explode.”
Your efforts either to follow or to flout instruction reflect something that is divinely endowed but commonly called “terrible” when people describe two-year-olds: you are discovering your will. What I don’t hear people talk about too often, however, is how their two-year-olds are discovering their will—that is, the wishes of their parents.
In my experience, you seem to care very much about what Mom and I want of you, even if you exercise spontaneous, headstrong, and sometimes totally irrational discretion in choosing whether to act on it. As a general rule, you want to understand us. You want to please us. You want to put the soap in the tub, just as much as Baby Groot wants to retrieve Yondu’s fin.
And I have to believe that this desire is innate. As pleased as we are that you aim to please, I think Mom and I really have had little to do with it. It seems more heart-borne than habit-learned.
So what stands in the way of your obedience, then? Well, your own will is part of it, to be sure. What we want doesn’t always line up with what you want. Or, if it does, theway we want it might differ. Although we may both want to read the book, you might insist on turning the pages.
But there are so many other factors than the “terrible” battle of the wills. Even if you want to do as we wish, you might not understand. Even if you understand, you might not be able. Even if you are able, you might not have the mental or physical energy at that moment to execute the task. And even if you have the strength, your feeble yet developing attention span might get drawn sideways, by a stuffed animal, or a screen, or a hunger pang, or who knows what.
Wait a second, though: such fickleness reminds me of someone, and it’s not a character from Guardians of the Galaxy.When I start listing all the possible obstacles to your obedience, I can’t but help but reflect on my own behavior. As you often do, you have gotten me thinking about the bigger picture—our toddler-like relationship to our heavenly Father. As I count off the parallels between you and Baby Groot, I realize that I am every bit as much a Baby Groot as you are.
Our heavenly Papa gives us what must be crystal clear instructions to His ears, spelled out as plainly as He can: “Love me, and love your neighbor.” We don’t quite get it, so He shows us an example: His son, in word and deed, embodying perfect love. Easy, right?
So what stands in the way of our obedience, then?
We misunderstand. When He says “love,” we hear “occasionally pay attention to.” When He says “neighbor,” we hear “the people you like the most.”
We are (or we feel) unable. We feel small, or powerless, or useless. We look at the chasm between selfish us and perfect Christ, and we think there’s just no way.
We lack the strength. We are tired, hungry, fussy, whiny. Our own need grabs us by the ears.
We get distracted. We would help our neighbor, but there’s a screen/ad/notification/newsbyte ringing the service bell and demanding our attention.
But you know what, dear son? Just as you draw my eye to my own pitiable obedience, you remind me of good news, too. First of all, you show me that obedience is both innate and learned. Your natural desire to please me and Mom is the start but not the end of this negotiation of wills. Just as you will go on learning what it means to be a good son, I can go on growing into the son of God that He has called me to be.
As your father, though, I know that there is better news yet: I know that the depth of my love for you has nothing to do with how well you obey me. And if my fatherly affection for you is any sort of indication of our heavenly Father’s affection for us, if it is just a sliver of the real thing, then His love is a bulwark never failing indeed, no matter how badly we botch our end of the deal.
As your father, I know that even when you mishear my instruction, even when you are too weak or too tired to listen, even when your mind snags on every loose thread in the room, your efforts to please me accomplish just that. They bring me great gladness.
When I see you listening to me, and running off eagerly to put my words to action, and returning with a proud glint in your eyes, it is not the underwear or the lizard or the desk in your hands that I care about. It is the orientation of your heart that makes me glad, a look that sings, “Did I please you, Papa?” and raises in my heart a resounding “yes, son, you did.”
I can picture Father’s face light up when His children, His distracted, wayward, feeble children, hear His voice and act on it. Surely, my son, He smiles on us—even when all our efforts amount to little more than soap in the laundry basket.
[1] Before you entered our home, we rarely lost anything. Now things just mysteriously disappear for months at a time, only to be found in the strangest of places—a plastic token inside a humidifier, a stack of Christmas ornaments on the whiteboard, a toothbrush inside the snack drawer. I can’t wait to see what turns up when we move houses one day.
[2] You must know that doesn’t actually work. Right?