We have a hill at our house. Nothing spectacular. Maybe three feet tall, covered in rocks and gravel.
My two-year-old likes to climb it. Which is nothing unusual because, well, he’s two. If there’s something to climb, he’s probably going to climb it.
Today was no different. Except this time, he needed my help.
He reached for my hand, got himself situated, moved his little legs to the side, squatted down, and started brushing rocks around.
That was it.
He wasn’t trying to get down. He wasn’t asking me to pick him up. He just wanted to play with the rocks, and apparently he needed his mama to help him balance while he did it.
And there I stood, holding his hand.
It’s funny how something so ordinary can get you thinking.
I’ve got four boys, all at different stages of needing help. My two-year-old needs help with just about anything under the sun. Opening a banana, opening a door, climbing a hill. You name it.
And speaking of opening doors, how often do we pray for God to open one for us? Anyway, that’s a thought for another day.
My five- and six-year-olds are a little different. Especially my six-year-old. He’s getting to that age where he thinks he can do just about anything himself.
And sometimes he can!
But sometimes he’ll spend entirely too long trying to figure something out before finally admitting he needs help.
And I imagine that only gets worse.
Teenagers? Goodness. I can already hear it.
“I got it, Mom.”
“I don’t need help.”
They’ll probably ask a complete stranger for help before asking their own mother.
Then comes adulthood. You move out, start making your own decisions, and eventually realize that maybe Mom and Dad weren’t quite as clueless as you thought they were.
And then you have kids of your own.
Boy, does that change things.
Suddenly you’re asking your parents questions you never thought you’d ask. You’re wanting advice. You’re wondering how in the world they managed to raise you, keep a house running, put food on the table, and remain somewhat sane.
And the help you need looks completely different than it did when you were two.
But you still need help.
I’ve been thinking about how similar that is to our relationship with God.
When we’re children, our prayers are different.
My five- and six-year-olds pray for God to help them obey.
And I absolutely love that.
Now, I imagine their thought process is something along the lines of, “Lord, please help me obey because Mom and Dad run a tight ship around here, and I really don’t want to get in trouble.”
Fair enough, boys. Fair enough.
But I pray for help obeying, too.
Except my prayer looks a little different.
I want God to help me obey because I want my heart to align with His Word. I want my desires to align with His will. I want to submit to Him, even when my own selfishness gets in the way.
Same request.
Different understanding.
And I think that’s how our spiritual lives go sometimes.
When we’re young in our faith, we ask God for help with one thing. As we grow, we begin asking for help with something else.
But there’s also this funny thing that happens as we become more mature.
We start thinking we don’t need quite as much help.
Kind of like my six-year-old.
We start studying our Bibles more. We attend worship. We pray. We serve. We try to live faithfully.
And if we’re not careful, we start getting a little too comfortable with ourselves.
Look how far I’ve come.
Look how much I’ve grown.
Look how devoted I am.
And somewhere in there, pride can sneak in.
As if becoming more spiritually mature somehow means we need less of God’s grace.
When in reality, the more we grow, the more we should recognize just how desperately we need it.
We don’t outgrow our need for our Father.
If anything, we should become more aware of it.
And that brings me back to my two-year-old on that little hill.
He climbed up there himself.
I didn’t put him there. I didn’t tell him to go up there. He decided that’s where he wanted to be.
But when he needed help balancing, he reached for my hand.
And I held it.
I didn’t ask why he climbed the hill. I didn’t tell him he should have thought about that before going up there. I just helped him find his balance.
And isn’t that something?
Sometimes we’re standing on a hill God wanted us to climb.
Sometimes we’re standing on a hill we had absolutely no business climbing in the first place.
Sometimes we’re right where we’re supposed to be, and sometimes we’ve made a mess of things through our own decisions.
But we can still turn to our Father.
That doesn’t mean God approves of every decision we make. It doesn’t mean He takes away every consequence or immediately fixes whatever we’ve gotten ourselves into.
Sometimes His help means holding us steady. Sometimes it means correcting us. Sometimes it means guiding us off that hill and back onto solid ground.
But we have to be willing to reach for Him.
And willing to follow where He leads.
Isaiah 41:13 says:
“For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, “Fear not, I am the one who helps you.”
I love that verse.
Especially now, thinking about that little hand in mine.
My toddler wasn’t asking me to do everything for him. He just needed me to stand there with him while he did what he wanted to do.
And I wonder how often I need to approach God that way.
Not necessarily asking Him to remove every obstacle. Not asking Him to make every decision easy. Not asking Him to make my life go exactly how I think it should.
Just asking Him to help me stand.
To guide my feet.
To keep me from stumbling.
And when I do stumble, because I certainly will, to help me find my footing again.
Motherhood has taught me a lot of things.
Patience, for one. Although I think we’re still working on that lesson.
But one of the greatest things motherhood has taught me is just how much I need God.
I see my children’s dependence on me every single day.
I see how they trust me. How they ask for help without thinking twice. How they sometimes refuse help because they’re convinced they can do it themselves.
I see how they need correction, guidance, encouragement, and sometimes just a hand to hold.
And then I realize how often I do the exact same things with God.
I want to figure things out myself.
I want to make my own decisions.
I want to believe I’ve got everything under control.
And then life has a way of reminding me that I most certainly do not.
I think that’s one of the beautiful things about parenthood.
We spend so much time trying to teach our children about God, and all the while, they’re teaching us about Him, too.
They’re reminding us what it means to have the faith of a child.
What it means to trust.
What it means to depend on someone.
And what it means to reach for help without feeling like we have something to prove.
I’m very prayerful that the way I parent my boys points them toward God.
That the way I love them, correct them, guide them, and help them reflects, however imperfectly, the love of our heavenly Father.
And I pray that doesn’t stop with my parenting. I want all my actions to point toward Him.
Which, of course, means I need His help.
A whole lot of it.
It’s a humbling thing, really.
Here I am trying to raise these boys to know God, and they’re continually reminding me how much I need to know Him better myself.
Maybe that’s why these little moments tend to weigh so heavily on me.
Because when I actually stop long enough to think about them, I’m reminded of just how good God has been to us.
And how much I still have to learn.
Today it was a three-foot hill, some gravel, and a two-year-old who needed help balancing.
Nothing extraordinary.
But it reminded me that no matter how old I get, how much Scripture I study, or how much I think I’ve grown spiritually, I’m still a child who needs her Father’s hand.
And I pray I never become too proud to reach for it.
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