Circle of Hope

This isn’t a word to parents, only. But that is where it focuses.

For parents the word is: Parenting should not be done alone.
For all of us it is: life (and life in Christ, in particular) is hard and we need each other.

Bible teaching about this:
John in 1 John: “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers and sisters. Anyone who does not love remains in death…. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in them? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.” (2:14,16-19, edited for inclusion)

Interpretation for the subject at hand:
1. Loving our new family in Christ is a sign that we are alive in Christ. There is no life outside the new community centered on Jesus. The central command to each member of this new family is to love each other in the same manner Jesus loved you.
2. John says we should apply this truth by sharing material needs. I am saying that we should apply it by sharing in the parenting of children and, what’s more, by sharing in the ongoing development we all are undergoing that was (of course) not completed by our birth parents.
3. John is talking about sharing something one has with one who needs it. Some of us are obviously gifted to attend to children and those people have built some vibrant community among Circle of Hope parents. Some of us may have less of that. But I would say the vast majority of us have enough maturity in Christ to have some basic human parental instincts activated, whether we are 18 or 48. We should care for young people as a village and we should care for the needy child in each other, too.

Marilyn Heins (common sense parenting author) says: “We need to change some of our attitudes. Right now most of us feel that it is wrong to interfere when we see bad parenting because we revere individuality and respect the rights of the family. But we have to find ways to help each other. Helping neighbors used to be the American way. We need to invent the equivalent of a barn-raising when a neighboring family is in trouble.”

I think a lot of us have the aversion Dr. Heins is talking about. We don’t go far enough to really help each other parent because we are protecting the parent’s rights and relying on their personal responsibility. For instance, when a child seems out of control to us at the PM, we are very hesitant to help the parent do their work. When a safari jeep drives up to a herd of elephants, the mother elephants circle their young. We could at least do that. Instead, we defer to the parent (even if they are out of ear shot).

An overwhelmed single parent might show up with rambunctious kids in tow, looking for something. We’d likely to be very nice to them and even empathetic. But when it came to helping them with their six year old bouncing off the walls, we’d be very cautious, like we’d be accused of child abuse if we had a relationship with the child. By the time we got over our fear, the kid would have grown up and grown up outside a Christian village. And as a result, they would have been taught individualism by the adults who protected that concept at the cost of love.

I’m throwing out more points than I am fully exploring, I know. But I hope they cause us to take a look at just how often we are willing to leave each other by the side of the road, needy and even hurting because we don’t think we have the right to be involved. Some of us are pushy, but most of us are just afraid of possibly being considered pushy. Some of us violate boundaries too much, but most of us are lounging behind boundaries to love, feeling like what is happening to our brothers and sisters is none of our business.

I think John tells us that loving our brothers and sisters, and their children IS our business. If we don’t lay down our lives for each other, we are not even alive. Parents and children living in the megalopolis need each other and they need the whole community to care about what they are doing. They have the main role to raise their children, they get to do it the way they do it, but they can’t and shouldn’t do it alone.