My Daughter and My Finger

Sorry about not posting now, but I became a father last week, a very odd, wonderful, tiring, frustrating, exhilarating feeling. Some of what my little girl does I was told to expect, and some of it completely catches me off guard. Her first day in the world I was holding her on my lap and just went to stroke her face. Instead of rubbing against my finger, or moving away, she rolled into it, grabbed my finger tip in her little mouth and started sucking like mad. I was so surprised I didn’t do anything for a little bit, I just sat there.

I knew babies breast fed, of course, but I had no idea how instinctive their latching and sucking instincts were. I was completely caught off guard. In a moment I got my bearings and tried to pull my finger out of her mouth. It was actually hard to do. She had such a grip on my finger that I was a little worried about hurting her to be honest. I couldn’t easily remove that finger, it really took a bit of effort. I thought that once she understood she wasn’t getting anything from my finger she would let go, but no luck. She didn’t care if she was getting anything from it, she just knew she needed to be sucking on something and was hoping that if she sucked on everything coming her way she would get something from it. I just sat and marveled at how naïve my daughter is. But then I started thinking about my job as pastor and realized that the Church often does the exact same thing. We grab at whatever fad is coming our way, whatever idea has the label “Christian” on it, and hope that it fills our needs.

But most of the time those things don’t really help at all. Or they help for a time, but they don’t feed us in the long haul. But do we get rid of them? Of course not. We just suck harder, trying to get some food from something that simply does not feed us. And so we are sometimes left with service ideas, songs, rituals, and entire ministries in the Church that do not feed us at all, but we’re like my little daughter, still sucking away at my finger, not even knowing if it gives us food or not.

Unlike my daughter, though, we should be able to know what feeds us and what doesn’t, at least after we try it for a while. We need to take a long look at what we do, both as individuals, and as churches, and think about what actually feeds us and what does nothing more than fill our mouths without giving us any spiritual food in return. I can pull out my finger from my baby daughter, but no one except us will stop part of the church that doesn’t feed us. We have to release the fingers in our lives and try and find where God is really giving us food, emphasize that, spend time with those things.