Posts Tagged: learning to walk

“God and the Lesser Pain”

On August 13, 2022 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

There was a time when I wasn’t allowing my oldest daughter to learn to walk. My intentions may have been good. After all, I didn’t want my daughter to experience the pain of falling. We lived in a parsonage that had a hardwood floor. So, I would catch her. My daughter turned it into a game called “I-fall-backwards-and-daddy-catches-me”. The game was great fun, but there was a downside: My daughter was not learning to walk.

Finally, my wise and tough wife said to me, “She’s never going to learn to walk if you keep doing that.” She was right and I knew it.

So, the next time our daughter started to walk, I stood a few feet away. As she fell backward, I contraried my instincts and let her fall. She looked back at me with such shock and accusation that I almost thought that I had done the wrong thing. But within a few days, she was walking.

“Underneath are the everlasting arms,” said God to Moses. However, that doesn’t mean that God always catches us when we fall. Sometimes, God lets us fall. We call these “consequences”. Some of us also question God. “Why didn’t you catch me?” Actually, this is often more of an accusation than a question.

But here is the bottom line, I think: God wants us to learn to walk. A painful process? Yes! At least, the falling is. I suspect that God, because God loves us so much, finds our falls to be very painful, too. However, it will be more painful in the long run for us and for God if we don’t learn how to walk. And God will always choose the lesser pain for Himself and for us.

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“Falling and Learning to Walk”

On June 22, 2019 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

“Each time a toddler falls is a lesson in how to walk.” (From Today’s Gift: Daily Meditations for Families)

The above quote from one of my twelve-step readings today reminded me of an incident that happened when my oldest daughter was learning to walk.  We were living in a house that had hardwood floors.  Our eleven-month-old daughter fell a lot when she was learning to walk.  I hated to see her fall on the hard floor, so I decided to “help.”  My “help” took the form of trying to catch her before she fell.  Soon, it became a game.  She would look back to see if I was there.  Then, she would fall backwards, knowing that I would ease her down on the floor.

My wise wife reminded me that, if I kept doing that, our daughter would never learn to walk.  I didn’t want my wife to be right, so I figured that she probably was.  So, I gathered up all my courage, took a step back from my daughter, and let her fall.

I will never ever forget the look of surprise and betrayal on my daughter’s face.

But she learned to walk.

No matter how old we are, we are all learning to walk.  We walk through relationships and the loss of relationships.  We walk through learning new skills and new jobs.  We walk through the labyrinth of our own minds.  We walk through our addictions.

And, oh yes, we fall—a lot.  But to fall is not necessarily to fail.

And falling doesn’t necessarily mean that our heavenly Father has failed, either.  God doesn’t always catch us.  This is not a sign of his absence or of a lack of love on God’s part.  It is a sign that God wants us to learn to walk.

There is no learning to walk without falls.

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