November 2003
When I used to see large families (say, families with five or more children), the idea always creeped into my mind that one or more of the children are, for lack of a better term, expendable.
That's not quite the right term, but let me illustrate this creepy attitude that used to afflict me. A guy down the street had seven children. His wife had complications with their eighth child and was hospitalized for a few weeks. My wife was talking with a few of the older children one afternoon to see how their mother was faring. Their little little brother (four years old or so) came running up and said to my wife, face beaming and excited, "My mommy's coming home today."
My wife told me this charming story, and I immediately started wondering, "How special is a mommy to a little boy with six other siblings? Can he really be that special to her and she to him?"
I now have a large family (six children, oldest being ten; more may be coming). I frequently find myself picking up one of them and thinking "What would I do without this little guy/girl?"
My mindset has–with no willfulness on my part–intuitively switched from presuming expendability to presuming necessity. There's something in me that says this fourth/fifth/sixth child is crucial to me and my family.
I'm curious about that unnoticed change in my mindset (what causes one's mental landscape to swtich? Obviously, external factors play a critical role, but how does the switch occur? There's fodder here for research and contemplation and writing). I'm more curious, however, about its relationship to God.
The rigors of logic and philosophy tell us that God created this world and all its creatures because He wanted to, not because he needed to. In this sense, we are expendable to him. This seems especially believable when one considers the billions and billions of people that have passed through these earthen gates.
But the rigors of theology (which start with His revelations) tell us he mourns to lose any of us. Theology also analogizes him to a parent.
The parallels to my previous attitudes are remarkable.
Initially, excessive children seem expendable. For that matter, before I had children I sympathized with couples who would opt not to have any children at all, though such a decision now strikes me as ludicrous. And now that I have children, they don't at all strike me as expendable and, indeed, I'd suffer remarkably if I lost one of them.
So it is with God's attitude toward us. Initially, we were expendable (indeed, we know He existed without us during the front-end of eternity, whatever that is), but now he tells us he loves us and laments if he loses just one of billions.
But what it is it about the children that makes them seem necessary. It's not just that I love them and cherish them. There's something about each one of them that makes them seem necessary to my existence, a requirement to my happy life; heck, as a condition to any life at all. Why is that? And furthermore, has the same thing (at least through weak analogize) happened to God since He created man? Are we somehow necessary to his meaningful existence?
Taking the latter question first, the answer is "no," when the term "necessary" is taken in its strict sense. God is sufficient unto himself because He is perfect. If something is necessary to something else, it means that something else lacks something, and God doesn't.
That doesn't mean, however, that God doesn't "need" us in a manner analogously to a parent's "need" for his child. Indeed, when I say I "need" my children, it can be argud that I really don't. If a child dies, I won't die. And if a child goes to Hell, I won't go to Hell (though it doesn't bode well for me if a child ends up there).
