What God Wants

Having kids has been a powerful theological lesson for me.  I'm not saying that understanding God as a cosmic parent is the perfect theological paradigm, but for me I needed to have kids to really understand love... and sin... and grace.
The love part is obvious.  From the moment they were born, I knew these two little people were absolutely the most amazing things.  I knew that I would do anything for them, I knew, I think for the first time in my life, what it meant to love something more than you love yourself.
What I have come to find out is that that sort of love makes you vulnerable.  It means that these people that you would die for are able to hurt you and make you angry like no one else in the world.  When they disobey, when they are willful and stubborn, worst of all when they are exactly like... me.  That's where I have really come to grips with sin, I mean exactly what it is.  Before kids, I thought it was all about breaking rules that God had set, maybe for our own good, maybe just out of an arbitrary power trip, but rules that we ought to follow because God is God and we are his creations.  After kids, I understand that sin is not just about rules, it's about abusing, perverting or neglecting a relationship.  I know this because there are rules that I don't particularly mind my kids breaking.  Maybe this is more of a thing for fathers, but when I see my kids pushing the boundaries a little bit, it kind of makes me proud.  Even if it's not exactly safe, I want them to climb a little higher into that tree, to reach for another branch, to try for a new experience, it makes me think they're becoming solid and adventurous human beings.  You can't do that without breaking some rules.
Where a line gets crossed is when they break rules out of malice and selfishness, not because they're exploring, but because they're willfully ignoring my edict.  Most infuriating is when they do this because they think that my rules are stupid or irrelevant.
The reason this hurts is because I have made the rules and set the boundaries "for their own good."  That phrase, which every kid hates to hear, but that the wisdom of age teaches you with hard lessons, is at the core of a very important theological understanding: God knows what is really best for us, as Creator, there is not any foreseeable situation where our own desires and intentions can possibly transcend God's knowledge of what is best for us.
As a parent, I hope someday that my kids will be able to make decisions for themselves that do actually transcend my knowledge, it means I have done my job.  And I suspect that God has similar hopes for us, that we will internalize and understand the rules so that we know which ones are fundamentally important and which ones we have moved beyond.  The rules I set for my 10 year old are going to change rapidly over the next few years, in some ways he is going to have more freedom, but life is also going to get more complicated, and the simple, black and white morality is going to need more nuance and grey areas are going to be unavoidable.
If God is at least as thoughtful a Creator as I am a father (which I'm certain is absolutely true), then the rules cannot be static.  The rules have to change as the child grows, and sometimes mistakes must be made.
The only way my kids will ever become responsible moral agents, is if I give them the freedom to cross some lines every now and then, and if I also allow them to suffer the consequences.  That is not easily done.  That is not even easily imagined from my current vantage point.  This is where grace is needed.
Grace to forgive bad decisions.  Grace to revise the rules as needed.  Grace to remember that the love that started the moment they were born should still be there and actually should grow stronger with the years.  Grace to remember that all the trials they put me through are no worse or no better than the ones I put my own parents through, and grace most of all to remember that God has that kind of grace and more for me and my stumbling existence.