Farsighted

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

1 JOHN 2:15–17

“PARENTS OF GIFTED CHILDREN THINK TEN, MAYBE TWENTY, years down the road. Parents like us think one hundred years ahead.”

Alan and Lindsey have a fifteen-year-old boy named Robby. The best way to describe Robby is that he’s slow. He was slow to crawl, slow to speak, slow to read, and slow to catch on to social situations. He has a hard time participating in conversations with his peers because language is so difficult for him that he’ll come in at awkward moments of the conversation—say, five minutes after a topic has already passed, he’ll bring it up again, out of the blue. His friends look at him like he’s weird.

“They just don’t understand,” Alan explained, “that Robby has been working really hard for those five minutes to think of something so that he can participate in the conversation.”

When Robby was younger, he had several friends, but most of them have fallen away by now. When more complicated social situations revealed Robby’s slowness, the friends found new companions who could keep up. “A couple boys may still call him once or twice a year out of pity,” Alan said, “but Robby’s pretty much on his own.”

Alan added, “With your kids, you probably think five or ten years ahead—high school graduation, marriage, a job, grandkids, stuff like that. We have to be honest—Robby’s high school diploma will be marked with more concessions than a Middle East peace plan. College is not in his future. It’s difficult to imagine him ever getting married, and most of the counselors we work with concede that, while Robby may find a vocation, it’s unlikely it’ll ever be one that pays him enough to support himself, much less a family.

“For a while, Lindsey and I kept living with the loss, but finally I understood we need to be more farsighted. Robby’s gift to the world is that he teaches us this world isn’t always ‘fair,’ and that this age isn’t the end of the story. Some kids, by their gifting, point to this world; others, by what they lack, point to heaven. Robby may not have many friends down here; he may not enjoy the intimacy of marriage or the pleasure of holding a newborn son or daughter, but the pleasures of this world, as rich as they may be, don’t even compare with the wonderful realities waiting for us in heaven. I was always so focused on this world with the other kids that I almost never thought about heaven. That’s not the case with Robby. With him, I think about heaven all the time.”

I asked Alan what helped him to turn this corner, to become “farsighted” in a world of “nearsighted” parents. He came back the next day and showed me a copy of Jonathan Edwards’s Heaven: A World of Love.

Edwards has often been called the last of the Puritans and America’s greatest intellect.

Alan took me through some passages that spoke most deeply to him. In one chapter, Edwards wrote, “There are none but lovely objects in heaven. No offensive or unlovely or polluted person or thing is to be seen there. . . . And there is nothing that is deformed with any natural or moral deformity; but everything is beautiful to behold and amiable and excellent in itself.”^a

“The day is coming,” Alan explained, “when Robby’s disabilities will fall away. He’ll laugh right on cue instead of three minutes after everybody else has moved on from the joke. For the first time, the beauty of his glorified heavenly body will lead others to admire him instead of to look at him like he’s weird while they try to figure out what’s wrong with him.”

“Now get this,” Alan gushed. He reads from another chapter, “Love in heaven is always mutual. It is always met with appropriate returns of love. . . . No inhabitants of that blessed world will ever be grieved with the thought that they are slighted by those that they love, or that their love is not fully and fondly returned.”

“Do you have any idea how many times my and Lindsey’s hearts have been broken as we’ve watched Robby call a friend; to wince through an insecure, hard-to-understand phone call; and then for us to see that hurt look on his face as he senses his former friends pulling away? In heaven, all that will be over. He’ll never be slighted; his love will always be, as Edwards puts it, ‘fondly returned.’ ”^b

The types of kids with glowing accomplishments—the ones about whom many parents fill their Christmas letters—do tend to make us shortsighted. We can become obsessed with their recreational abilities, their educational achievements, their future family life opportunities, or their vocational possibilities. But every now and then, God sends a kid who has none of that, who breaks his or her parents’ hearts with the sadness they face but who can expand their souls with the truth that this world, and all that is in it, is passing away.

“Do not love the world or anything in the world,” John tells us. “If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.” (1 John 2:15–17).

If we’re not careful, we can be so enamored by this world’s promises and pleasures and cycles that we forget we don’t belong here. Thanks be to God, there is great glory and beauty in this world! There can be great happiness, great excitement, and great meaning. But as believers, we must remember that for which God created us, the glorious hope on which all our hopes are based: “And this is what he promised us—eternal life” (1 John 2:25).

Parents whose kids “fit in” with this world may become so preoccupied with this world that they forget, or neglect, to prepare them for the next world—and what a tragedy that would be—to have kids who “succeed” at a life that will last a mere eighty or ninety years but who forfeit the world without end because they became too nearsighted.

Thank God for the kids who don’t let us forget what really matters: “But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first” (Matthew 19:30).

Every difficulty and disappointment in our children’s lives, as hard as they are for us to bear, can remind us to become more farsighted in our parenting. This world is important, but it won’t be the last chapter in our kids’ lives; in fact, it’s barely even an introduction.^c

Heavenly Father, we are so grateful that, in many ways, this life is just the beginning. You have tremendous plans for the new heavens and the new earth, and we thank you for the hope that promised future brings and the comfort it gives to present disappointments. In Jesus’ name, amen.