Learning Helplessness

Theoretically, I knew, even before God allowed us to have our own children, that parenting was a shaping experience. I knew that it forced people to grow up and change. I knew it was supposed to mold and improve one’s character.

What I never expected was how.

I always thought that parenting made us different people because we had more responsibilities and more people to care for. I thought the hardest things would be mustering enough strength and wisdom to do the right thing each and every time.

Little did I expect that the one thing about parenting that compels me to grow spiritually day after day after day is how much it makes me feel helpless.

For the record, I hate feeling helpless. I have always been the type of person to be over-prepared for everything in life. I think, rethink, and overthink. I plan, replan, and plan some more. As a student, I hated pop quizzes but thrived on scheduled exams. As a wife, teacher, and mother, I operate on checklists and spreadsheets of every single kind.

When I encounter problems, my instinct is to research. My go-to coping mechanism is to arm myself with knowledge and to form a plan of attack, to somehow feel more in control by having more information in my arsenal. I’ve done this for illnesses, for tests, for projects, for events.

But if I were to be honest with myself, it really is just an fancy way of leaning on my own understanding.

Parenting forces me to reckon with the times when all that preparation falls short.

With parenting, I’ve shed tears over milk ducts that refuse to make any more milk despite putting myself through every supplement and suggested practice there was. With parenting, I’ve watched helplessly as the thermometer keeps showing me 38, 39, and maybe even 40 degrees as I wipe down and comfort and feed medicine to a crying sick child. With parenting, I hear advice from people and websites and professionals that may well contradict each other and realize I am destined to fail by one standard or another no matter what choices I make.

With parenting, I come face to face with my children’s character flaws and my own, powerless to overcome them without the Holy Spirit. With parenting, all the information and knowledge I can amass fall short in addressing the needs of the human heart.

And in the midst of that helplessness, I learn to turn to God. In the midst of that helplessness, I am forced to reckon with how little I truly can control and achieve.

I don’t like feeling helpless. But hard as it is, being forced to learn my own helplessness has been the best way to make me learn dependence on God.

When it comes to this area of life, I’m not exactly a good student. I keep forgetting my lessons and keep having to be reminded of them again and again and again.

But I hope that every time I come face to face with my own limitations, I will learn just a little bit better. I will remember better. I will recognize the truth more readily. And even if I might never prefer the feeling of feeling helpless, may I come to embrace how it directs me towards a truer, fuller dependence upon the Lord.