It's Mine!

Our dolls' hair didn't look quite this good...

When my sister and I were little, one afternoon (probably "one of those days"...you'd have to ask my mom...) we were allowed to open a mysterious box that had been sitting in a closet.  It held some of the greatest treasures imaginable to our childish hearts - two Ginny dolls (circa 1950s) and hundreds of handmade dresses and accessories for them.  We were immediately smitten.  Mary and Ginny became the heroes of all our doll games (and the Barbies became the villians...).  They carried hobo-style packs of elaborate changes of clothes wrapped in hand-embroidered handkerchiefs as they went about their adventures, escaping the evil orphanages run by Rollerskating Barbie and Belle Barbie and finding the safe, loving arms of their adoptive parents Teddy and Beary.  We would lock ourselves in our room for hours to play with them.  We had fights over which doll got to wear which dress, and when Mary's joints grew loose, we learned to play more gently with her.  Years passed, and we still loved the afternoons when we could shut ourselves away from the world and play with the Ginny dolls.

Then, one day, the awful news came.  Mary and Ginny didn't actually belong to us.  They were the childhood toys of a relative who now wanted them back.  We had to pack everything up and mail it away...all the chiffon and gingham and the beautiful dolls with their eyes that blinked.  Even though we were almost in junior high and pretended like we didn't care, we were crushed.  To this day, I think one of us is a little bitter.  The dolls were leaving us, who loved them so and played with them frequently and with great care and imagination, to go sit in the closet of our relative (or maybe to be sold on eBay to the highest bidder).  Toy Story 2, anyone?  To add insult to injury, the relative sent us a couple of Barbie dolls to "replace" Mary and Ginny.  Ha! 

The logical side of our brains acknowledged the facts of the situation: the dolls had belonged to this relative first, and it was quite possible that they were even more loved by her than they were by us.  What we had assumed was a permanent loan turned out to be not quite so permanent, and we had no grounds for complaint.  After all, we had received years of enjoyment from vintage playthings that didn't belong to us.  But once you've physically possessed something, your emotions decide that it belongs to you.  The longer you go on possessing it, the more you lay claim to it.  Those dolls were ours!

On a much larger scale, this is happening in my life again.  Have you ever noticed those pesky possessive pronouns we use when we describe offspring?  My daughter, our son...built into our speech is an inkling of the idea that our children belong to us, or, put more shockingly, that we own our children.  Pondering this, though, from both a philosophical and a Scriptural point of view, an alarm bell sounds.

Purely philosophically, children are human beings, with the same right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, self-determination, and whatever other natural rights we feel are afforded to all human beings.  I recognize that, practically speaking, they must be trained by adults to appropriately use and pursue these rights and that they can't take hold of all of their rights until they have reached a given age or maturity level, but the thought that children are literally owned by their parents (or any other entity) can lead down some dangerous paths. 
It might be better to say something like parents are given responsibility for and authority over children, but we don't have a pronoun for that.

Of course, if parents are given responsibility and authority, the question we must ask is; who is doing the giving?  Scripture is clear that children are a blessing from the Lord (Ps. 127:3) and that parents have a responsibility before the Lord to discipline and instruct those children (Eph. 6:3).  Just like with those Ginny dolls, though, as I say "my child", as my heart lays claim to that child, I start to forget the reality that these verses teach.

No matter what my emotions tell me, my children are not mine.  I don't have any real right or claim to the little life growing inside of me or the little life napping in the room next door.  The logical fact is that my children are unique human beings who belong to the Lord.  He loves them more than I do, and He may give them to me to care for and He may take them back as He pleases.  That doesn't make it any easier emotionally to let go of something that my human heart has decided belongs to me, but it's the truth. 

So,  I acknowledge the logical reality: Arthur isn't mine.  I also embrace the emotional reality: every moment that I get with Arthur is a beautiful gift that God didn't have to give me, and yet each moment makes me more likely to think that somehow he belongs to me.  Try holding all that in your heart at once!  And yet, that is what each parent must do, as well as each little girl who gets to borrow the most amazing dolls ever and then has to give them back.