A Munich Moment

I walked through the Marienplatz in Munich with the old city hall and famous glockenspiel in the center of the square that draws tourists by the millions and sets up photo ops galore. In the middle of the square a young toddler defiantly resisted her mother’s attempts to get a smiling family photo. You could tell she was burning calories by the minute just to keep frowning as her mother implored her to smile for one quick second.

Maybe the little girl was tired. Maybe she was cold. Maybe she was hungry. But looking at this scene from the perspective of a dad and now grandfather, I wanted to tell her, “Honey, your parents feed you, clothe you, house you, and are even taking you on vacation. Everything you have is because of them. Just about your only job in life right now is to occasionally smile and give them a nice photo when they’re on vacation. Is that asking too much?”

Of course, that little girl is too young to realize how much she owes her parents. I view my own parents with increasing awe the older I get.

In spite of any disappointments or hurts you may have received from your parents, you literally do owe your very life to them. Without them, you wouldn’t exist. And nobody can give you anything more glorious than life, even if they withheld everything else. 

It dawned on me that sometimes I can be like that little girl. I owe God so much and yet can be so resistant with the smallest requests to serve others in return. To begin with, God created me. And then, he made me a human.  He could have made me a cow instead, which I’m very glad He didn’t. Standing in the rain for a couple years and eating grass, only to become someone’s dinner, and never getting to read a book, isn’t my view of an ideal life.

Even more, however, God released the grace for me to become a Christian, to know my place as His son, to understand and revel in His truth, to worship Him, and to receive His wise and affirming counsel.

Just think about how our entire hope is centered on who God is: As God the Father we know He is for us, not against us; God the Son died and rose from the dead so that our sins could be covered and we could be reconciled to God; and God the Spirit counsels us and empowers us to live a life that honors God, the life we want to live but are too weak to live on our own.

He’s everything.

We can never repay God for any of this. And one thing that God asks those of us who are married (just as that mother asked her daughter to smile) is to love His daughter (or son), our spouse, with an unselfish, devoted, and cherishing love. Nobody is easy to love all the time, just as it’s not always easy to smile if you’re three-years-old, cold, tired, and hungry, but in the context of all we’ve been given, is it really asking too much of us to honor God by loving His child, our spouse?

The most revolutionary thought in my marriage was learning to view God as my heavenly Father-in-law, using that earthly image and relationship as motivation to double-down on loving my wife well. This image removes our sense of obligation from “is my spouse worthy?” to loving an imperfect and sometimes difficult person out of reverence for a perfect God who has treated us so well.

I don’t want to be like a three-year-old girl who won’t give her parents, to whom she owes so much, one little smile for a photo. I want to be like a husband who loves his wife because he is acutely aware of all he owes the God who calls my wife His daughter. I want to be tireless in showing Him how grateful I am, and how mindful I am of His many blessings, knowing as an earthly dad that few things mean as much to me as someone loving my own children well.

It is a joy and delight to love a woman as excellent as my wife.  But God calls me to always love her and never be harsh with her (Colossians 3:19) and even to love her like Christ loves the church (Ephesians 5:25ff.). That kind of love requires supernatural motivation, which only the love of God can provide. 

Think often of all that God has given you. You’ll see it’s not too inaccurate to realize that God asking us to love His son or daughter in return isn’t much more than a mom asking her daughter to give her one little smile in the middle of the Marienplatz on a cold winter day.