My nephew, his wife, and their first child dropped by for a visit.  My nephew is one of the kindest, most gentle young men I’ve ever known.  Nevertheless, he has already begun to have certain expectations of his six-month-old son.  While it has become unfashionable to have expectations of anyone under the age of eighteen, I think that Caleb is a wise dad.

For example, when Caleb and Deborah put the little guy down for the night, they actually expect him to sleep.  Imagine that!  If he fusses, they check to see that he is okay, and if he is, Caleb talks to Jared, and then taps him a couple of times on his bottom.  (No, this is not child abuse.  Caleb is as far from an angry, controlling abuser as you could ever imagine.)

But then, Caleb does something else.  He picks up Jared, cuddles him, and tells him how much he loves him, but that it is time to go to sleep.  I am old-fashioned enough to think that this is a good balance.

However, a problem has arisen: Jared enjoys being held and cuddled, so now he sometimes gets fussy at bedtime in order to get some attention.

So, Caleb is struggling with something we all struggle with all our lives: the balance between judgment and unconditional love.  It sometimes feels like a tightrope with no net below you.

My wife and I had a similar problem with our first child.  She was about six weeks old, and would not sleep for more than fifteen minutes at night.  My wife was nursing her.  Our little one would nibble around, and then doze off to sleep—for a few minutes.  Then, she would wake up and want to eat some more.  My wife and I were about to go crazy from lack of sleep.

Finally, my wife talked to her mom about the problem.  Her mom said that we needed to let our daughter “cry it out.”  So we did.  The first night, our baby cried pathetically for the longest fifteen minutes of our lives.  Then, she stopped.  Then she cried.  Then she stopped.  We finally figured out that she was listening for footsteps.  That night, she ate more than usual when my wife went in to nurse her.

The next night, she cried less, ate more, and slept more.  Within a few days, she was sleeping through the night, and so were we.

A friend of mine and I are accountability partners to each other.  Later the same day my nephew’s family visited, my friend and I were talking on the phone about balancing taking our sins seriously and God’s unconditional love.  I did not make the connection with Jared’s bedtime behavior until later.

God really, genuinely, deeply loves us.  No matter how old we are, we are still his little children.

However, God also has expectations of us.  When we rebel against those expectations, judgment follows.

Sometimes, I’m afraid, we (I) fall into the trap—and it is a trap—of thinking that we need to rebel in order to experience God’s unconditional love.  God swiftly backs away, in order to give us time to think (and act) more soberly.  Perhaps we feel that God has abandoned us.

No, God has not abandoned us!  He is just on the other side of the door of judgment, waiting for us to take his call to holiness more seriously.  Perhaps God’s judgment is one aspect of his unconditional love, rather than the opposite of God’s unconditional love.  God loves us entirely too much to let us get by with controlling, manipulative behavior, at any age.  Perhaps we don’t need to keep the balance between unconditional love and judgment.  Perhaps we just need to respect the balance that God has already established.