Lessons learned among the “walkers”

For reasons that are still largely inexplicable to me but are probably something along the lines of “trying to be a good dude” or “trying to impress my wife,” I volunteered to help her in the church nursery last Sunday night. It has probably been a good 15 years since I’ve done anything this crazy, and as soon as it started, I knew why: I really don’t like kids much at all. My own, who I love very much, are 21 and 18. This is something I can say now because I’m no longer young and single and trying to make girls think that I “like kids” as a means of trying to get them to date me.

My wife had had a long day, and the last thing she wanted was to get stuck in the nursery with someone awkward, so I volunteered with a great attitude, saying, “Don’t expect a whole lot out of me, but I’ll be there.”

We were in “walkers,” which is a step up, age-wise, from “bed babies” (cute) or “crawlers” (still semi-cute). Not one cute or precocious thing occurred the entire night. “This is like a zombie movie,” I told my wife, roughly 30 seconds into the experience. Here’s what walkers do, in a nutshell: toddle around with dirt and mucus on their faces (how is it there, all the time?), pull stuff off of shelves, look at it, refuse to play with it, throw it on the ground, and then wobble over to another area where they begin pulling stuff off shelves. They cry at the drop of a hat, for no apparent reason, and sometimes refuse to be comforted. One of them crawled up in my wife’s lap just to poop, which I knew because of the rictus of concentration etched on his face. It was a long night.

My wife and I have affectionately nicknamed our church The Fertile Crescent, in that it seems like babies are literally flying out of young mothers there, and that somehow the Reformed gestation period has been shrunk to like four to five months instead of the standard nine. It’s wild. There were a lot of walkers.

“I’m in here with 55 kids, which represents like three families in our church,” I texted to my buddies in the sanctuary, where we sometimes keep a robust group chat going during members meetings. I’m the unofficial DraftKings Sportsbook of the meetings, setting over/unders for length of talks, the line for the first guy to talk in the open mic time, etc. Like me, my buddies are all out of the “having little kids” stage, so they’re able to be clever and funny again.

We’re now a couple of decades into the Nouveau Reformed Big Family Movement and it has gone … just about like you’d think. Some of the massive families were well-equipped for it and thrived, some of them did it because of something akin to peer pressure and struggled, and everything in between. At its nadir, it was saturated with pride and self-satisfaction and was basically an extra-Biblical bad look … at its zenith, the snot-covered “walkers” of two decades ago are now the regenerate, God-loving, fun, productive church men and women of today. This, of course, makes my heart feel full, despite not really liking kids.

I used to really resent the huge-family Reformed flex … and, in fact, resented it a lot when I was writing a book called Why We Love the Church around 15 years ago. We were going through infertility then (tough, in the Fertile Crescent) and responded to it … very poorly. Very sinfully. I resent it a lot less now, and I love The Church—and my local church—a whole lot more.

I love my own two sons with a love that aches … that hopes … that endures. I loved them dearly when they were toddling around and ripping stuff off shelves, but I really like them now. I’ll probably never know if the Bible really commands us to have as many children as our bodies can bear, or if there is room for a wise and prayerful consideration of our resources, health, and inclination. But I’m glad for the two sons the Lord is allowing us to parent, and I love all these little zombies in our church nursery … someday I’ll like them, too.