Bottle Feeding Lessons

First I just have to say Happy Birthday to my wonderful and amazing mother who gave birth to four kiddos, raised 5 teenagers (plus several extras here and there!) and still takes cares of even as adults. She checks in, loves us, worries about us, helps us and is always, always there for us with a hug, a smile, and a listening ear. Happy Birthday Mama, thanks for being the best mom ever!
And it's fitting it's her birthday today since she and Dad were the first two people to teach me to make allegories about my faith from my everyday life. This one's dedicated to you Mom!

While I was in Texas I was helping take care of a 3 month old precious baby boy. One day as I was feeding Jr. I noticed that he had a habit of pushing the bottle away. It wasn’t that he didn’t want it. It was actually the opposite, he wanted to hold it himself but his hands weren’t big enough and he didn’t have enough coordination to be able to handle it. He needed help.

It got me thinking about our interactions with God. Our Heavenly Father will try to feed us spiritual truth in a loving way but we push against His efforts, wanting to do it ourselves but we’re not strong enough to handle the tasks. We may want to take care of it on our own but we can’t. Patiently the Lord tries and tries again to teach us until finally, like I had to do with Jr., He sometimes has to hold down our hands. This way He can get the bottle into our mouths so we can eat and be nourished without us getting in the way.

Another thing I noticed with Jr. was that when he would get hungry he would, like all babies do, cry. Nothing new there but then I’d have to make him his bottle. He didn’t understand the process so he would cry harder and harder until when the bottle was finally ready he was crying too hard to eat. He was hungry and I had the bottle he craved but he couldn’t enjoy it until he calmed down a little.

It got me thinking how when we’re asking God for something and we don’t get it right away we get upset. We start complaining, screaming and crying so by the time we finally do get it our attention is so focused on our tantrum that we don’t realize He’s answered our prayer. Or we do realize but we’re not as grateful as we should be. Instead of thanking God for what He’s been doing, preparing us to receive His gift, we’ve been complaining and we’ve let the devil steal our joy.

The best way to combat this is to thank God for what He’s doing even when we can’t see it. So when I’m praying “Lord, please let me find a way to pay the bills.” and I get an extra $5 I need to say, “Thank you Lord for this $5 to put towards the bills!” instead of saying, “Lord, this isn’t enough!”. Or when I’m praying, “Lord, please work in Sally’s life.” And then I see Sally making horrible decisions I can say, “Thank you, for the work that you’re doing in Sally’s life that I can’t see.” And it will keep my joy, and my faith alive so when I do see changes in Sally’s life I’m that much more joyful about it.

One more observation I had was how distracted Jr. would get when he was supposed to be eating. So I’d give him the bottle and he’d eat for a moment but then something would catch his attention and he’d stop. Now if I took the bottle away he’d start to cry. He wanted to eat but he also wanted to be distracted.

Doesn’t that make you think of how we are with God? We want to call ourselves a Christian but we also want to do our own thing. Yet God says He wants us 100% of us not 41% or 72% , 13% or even 99.9%. He’s only satisfied with 100% of our hearts, attention, actions, thoughts, and soul.

So there it is! Lessons I’ve learned from feeding an infant. As I write this I’m hoping and praying that someone actually finds this useful and it’s not just the result of not enough caffeine and a different schedule that makes this relatively simple task seem faith testing and though provoking to me.

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