And Then There Were Three: What Nobody Tells You About the Faith It Takes to Be a Parent

Nobody warns you, before you have a child, that the love is terrifying. Imani didn't understand this until three weeks in, at two in the morning, standing in the kitchen in the dark while her daughter cried in the next room. The terror wasn't fear that something was wrong. It was the overwhelming reality that something was this right and she was responsible for it, and the weight of that was larger than she had imagined love could be.

She had wanted this for years. Had prayed for it, hoped through the months where it didn't happen, held herself together through the months where it almost did and then didn't. When the test came back positive she had sat on the bathroom floor and cried in a way she hadn't expected to. The baby arrived on a Tuesday in October, healthy and real. And then the terror arrived with her.

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You love this person so much it is almost unbearable. And because you love them that much, the list of things you are afraid of is now infinite, every small sickness, every statistic read at two in the morning, every time they fall asleep so still that you lean over just to check.

Imani had heard people say that having a child changes your relationship with God. She understood it differently now. Because she was getting, in some small and inadequate way, the experience of loving something that was not hers to control.

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Hannah prayed for a child for years. Wept in the temple. Was so undone in her prayer that a priest thought she was drunk. And when Samuel was born, she held him and loved him, and then, when he was old enough, she brought him back to the temple and gave him to God. And she did it willingly, which is the part that stays with you. One of the most luminous songs of praise in the whole Old Testament pours out of her at the moment she hands him back. Because she understood something that most parents come to slowly: he had always belonged to God first. She was holding someone on loan.

That is not a cold theology. It turns out to be a freeing one. Because if the child belongs to God first, then God's interest in their life is greater than yours. His capacity to hold them is larger than yours. The love you feel for them is a fraction of the love they are already held in.

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When the angel told Mary she would carry the son of God, she said yes. Her yes is famous. What it sometimes obscures is what she was saying yes to: a life she could not predict or control, a child whose path would include things she would not choose for him. In Luke 2, when the twelve-year-old Jesus stays behind in Jerusalem without telling his parents, Mary and Joseph search for three days. When they find him, Jesus says: didn't you know I had to be about my Father's business?

A child telling his parents that the story is larger than the family. Mary does not fully understand it. The text says she treasured these things in her heart, which is the Bible's way of saying she held them without resolution.

That is the daily practice of parenting in faith: holding things without resolution and trusting that the love you feel for this person is held inside a larger love that knows what it is doing.

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Imani's daughter is two now. She still checks on her at night sometimes, leaning over the cot to watch her breathe. The terror hasn't gone. She thinks it might not ever entirely go. But she has learned to hold it differently, to place it alongside the trust rather than instead of it. Hannah gave Samuel back with a song. Imani is still learning the song. She thinks she is getting there.

You are not the final word on your child's life. That is terrifying and, when you sit with it long enough, deeply comforting.

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Part of the Between Sundays series. Available on Spotify.