Burden Lifters

Do you ever have your best thoughts while washing your hair? While you are falling asleep do you solve the problems of the world? This idea of "burden lifters" has been on my mind often as I shampooed and laid my head to rest. I'm going to give you the medium size story.

During hurricane Irene Dave and I had lots of time for reading without many of the normal responsibilities of regular life. One of the books I read was Orphanology, by Tony Merida and Rick Morton, who at that time both served at Temple Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, MS. It is all about their journeys of adoption and how individuals and churches can join the cause of the orphan, widow, downtrodden, etc. I highly recommend it.

At the end of the book is a bibliography, and in that bibliography I found lots of John Piper. Piper's story of adoption in itself is very interesting, so Dave and I used his phone to do a little more research. First we read his letter to his wife saying he was ready to adopt. (You can read it here, it is very moving.) Next, we went to an "Ask Pastor John" video about birth control (random, but true). But the power was out and the video didn't work on Dave's phone. Never fear, there was a transcript, so Dave read it for us. The video and transcript can be accessed here.

At the very end of the response he says this:

One other thing comes to my mind. I was in Germany when we started having a family. This was 1972. In 1972 people my age were saying it's a sin to have more than 2 kids. And some were saying it was a sin to have kids because population blah, blah, blah.

And I just thought to myself, "OK. If you have more than 2.1 kids you're putting a strain on the planet? I don't think so. Because the kids I'm going to raise are going to lift a million burdens."

You Christian, you've got to believe that bringing kids into the world and being brought up in the Lord makes them burden lifters, not burden adders. They are in the world to lift the world, to save the world, to love the world.

You're not just adding dead weight to the world when you bring a child up in the kingdom. You're bringing up lovers of people and servants of the world.

So, I'm going on and on here. I should probably just stop. I can't even remember what the question was now. So enough on that one.

 I love his ending :)  We've all been there before!

Having children is a blessing and a responsibility. And pure joy. We can't do it on our own, but with Christ our (Lord willing) van full of children aren't going suck the world or us of all our joys and resources. On the contrary, we pray and trust and work hard so that our children will bring great joy and blessing to our home and be a light to a dark world.

May Sarah be brought up in the Lord such that she lifts a million burdens!