celebration over the steps

February 11, 2013

There is a magical thing that happens in all homes all over the world. When you have a child, you want your child to crawl, and then you want your kid to walk. My first child, Audrey, pulled herself to the coffee table. When she got to the coffee table, she began to bounce on her knees, and then she began to coast along. From there she started letting go and just being wobbly. At that point, we began to get excited about the fact that Audrey was about to walk.  Eventually she took her hands off of the coffee table, and we watched physics in motion.
God has created children, specifically young children, with gargantuan heads and tiny little bodies. So when Audrey let go of the coffee table, her gigantic head fell forward, and suddenly she had a decision to make.  She could stick that foot out to catch herself or she could die. So she stuck her foot out, and then she had momentum. It was step, step, step, fall. Do you know what we did? We exploded in celebration. We picked her up, spun her around, and kissed her face. Then we sat her down and pleaded with her to walk toward us again. After that we began e-mailing, Facebooking, taking pictures, tweeting, and all sorts of other things to get the word out that Audrey was walking. We did that with our son, Reid, and we've done that with our daughter Norah.
What I have learned as I watched all of our friends have children is that there is always an epic celebration around the kid walking. This is news to be declared. "The kid is walking!"
For all the people I have watched go through that process, I've never seen anybody watch their kid go step, step, step, fall and then say out loud,"Man, this kid is an idiot. Are you serious? Just three steps? Man, I can get the dog to walk two or three steps. Honey, this must be from your side of the family, because my side of the family is full of walkers. This must be some sort of genetic, shallow gene pool on your side of things."
No father does that. Every father rejoices in the steps of his child. The father celebrates the steps of his child. I think what we have here is a picture of God celebrating us walking. So we step, step, step, and fall, and heaven applauds. At what? At the obedience of taking those three steps. The Father in heaven is crying,"He's walking!" "She's doing it!" And maybe the Accuser's saying, "No, he only took a couple of steps. That's nothing." But the celebration is in the steps, even if there are still falls. (The Explicit Gospel, Matt Chandler, 219-220)

Encouraging, comforting, and freeing.