If hard-wired lets you down

"Older women . . . are to . . . train the young women to love their husbands and children (ESV)." ". . . admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children (NKJV)." (Titus 2:3-4)

Do young women need admonishing to love their children? Husbands, well, I can see that. ("It's complicated," as the movie title says.) But aren't we women supposed to be hard-wired to love our children? Isn't that bundled with the package of hormones and monthly cycles?

Raise your hand if there is anyone out there who spent your kids' whole childhood regarding parenting as a burden. Raise your hand if you fed, clothed, schooled, and chauffeured them but didn't spend a day delighting in them and saying so to their faces. Isn't that love---to not only give away all you have and give up your body to be burned (1 Corinthians 13:3), but also to have feelings of love?

1 Corinthians 13:3 used to puzzle me. I thought, "Hey, if giving away all your stuff and putting your neck on the block for your neighbor is not love, then what is? Isn't that kind of sacrifice the very definition of "love"? Evidently not. Evidently, as Duke Ellington said, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."

We all know that at some point parental love may fail. It may be a high threshold for some and a low threshold for others. But it is written: "For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in" (Psalm 27:10). I notice that the parents of the man born blind in the gospel of John threw him under the bus (9:13-23). And in the Old Testament, we are presented with the spectacle of a woman who cooks her son and eats him (2 Kings 6).

I for one am not discouraged but encouraged at this little find in Titus-that women may need help in loving their kids. This is because there are little secrets of their own lovelessness that women take to the grave unless somebody out there acknowledges that women need help to love their kids. (I remember a friend of mine telling me how freeing it was when she overheard a famous and godly woman at prayer meeting asking that God would help her love her husband.) There is the natural, and then there is the supernatural.

I am also happy about Titus 2:4 because it is a command. And if Christ gives a command, then He will give resources. If He says to train to love my husband and my children, it is because it can be done. It is possible for any Christian to love anyone. You are not the one person that this is not going to work for. You are not the one person who is constitutionally incapable of loving. We ask and we receive.

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