Evie Help!

I am late writing this blog because I have been busy this week. I am almost always busy, but this week is busier than most because I have used 5 weeks of my vacation on essentially one of the dozen or so projects, and I had to finish all the rest of the projects in the last week.

Evie Help 1So I had only a few days to go, and I was fresh out of ideas, and still had a million things to do, and then suddenly, as so often happens, everything worked out. It really was so simple. I wash working at my task list, and my 18-month-old daughter joined in to help.

As she “helped” me roll the garbage pail down the driveway it suddenly occurred to me that this was the perfect picture of the way I relate to God sometimes. Sometimes in my prayers I will beg God to allow me to help Him with some task. I have always wanted to be able to help protect and care for abandoned and neglected children. I have also always wanted to provide medical care for poor people in austere, inhospitable environments. And while I am developing skills that might enable me to work in that direction some day, at the moment that doesn’t seem to be an option.

Still, no matter how grandiose my hopes, and no matter how “ordinary” my actual responsibilities, the Evie Help 2process is (or at least ought to be) much the same as Evie helping me with the garbage, or cleaning up scraps of lumber in the yard. Evie sees something that I am doing and because she wants to be with Daddy (or like Daddy, I am not sure which) she asks if she can help. And because I let her and I want to spend time with her, and also because I want her to learn to love work, I let her help.

There are some points about the process that I would do well to remember in my prayers asking for the chance to be “useful.” First, Evie “only does what she sees her parents doing” to paraphrase the Gospel of John. She likes to brush her teeth with Mommy’s tooth brush, walk around in Mommy’s shoes or Daddy’s combat boots, and help with the dishwasher or the laundry. In the same way, when I ask God to let me undertake some good task, if it really is a good task, I am not coming up with it on my own. I am asking because on some spiritual level I have “seen” that God is already working on that task.

Evie help 3Thus, whatever work He gives me to do is His work, not mine. He was already doing it, just like Kathleen and I were washing dishes and taking out trash long before Evie came along, and will continue to do so (most likely) long after she has moved out. Evie enters into a stream of work that existed before her and continues after her. Only her own part in it is new.

Secondly, God doesn’t need my help. I don’t need Evie’s help to water the plants, or take out the trash. In fact, her grip on the handle of the trash bin or watering can slows me down. I have to adjust to the pace of her little short legs.

In the same way, God doesn’t need my help. If anything, I am more of a hindrance. At best I am a not too deliberately recalcitrant tool, at worst I actually hinder and spoil the work by trying to do it all on my own, or by losing interest part way through. God runs that risk in order to let me help Him because…

Thirdly, God loves it when I ask if I can help. I love it that Evie wants to help me. I love the fact that she just wants to be around Kathleen and I and share in what we are doing. I love her enthusiasm and the fact that chores are still games to her because she hasn’t learned to see them as chores yet. I love the Evie Help 4opportunity to set and example and help her learn by doing how to serve other people, especially in the little, nitty-gritty, day-to-day things.

God loves it when I ask to be allowed to help Him. I means that I want to spend time with Him, and that thrills Him no end. He loves me and enjoys sharing the time with me. He also likes my enthusiasm, such as it is, as fickle and shallow and ignorant as it is. He loves the opportunity to help me learn, by imitation and by action, to care about other people the way He does.

God is a Father. I have learned a lot about Him by watching my own father, and by meditating on his care for my self and my siblings and our mother. I learned more by watching my older brother, and now some of my younger brothers, taking care of their children. Now I have the opportunity to learn more by my own fatherhood.

I have the opportunity to meditate on Evie’s relationship with me, and what that indicates about my relationship to Him. More and more I realize that in spiritual terms I am usually a toddler, but sometimes also a precocious and stuck-up pre-teen who thinks he knows more than he actually does. I also know that God loves me unconditionally and will never abandon me. He will always take care of me. I know this because that is how Evie relates to me. “And if you, being wicked, know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your Heavenly give good things to those who ask?” Matthew 7:11.

But I also get to meditate on His Fatherhood of me, and to work from that, backwards to how I am called to image that fatherhood towards my children. That alone is mission enough to keep me busy for a lifetime.

But I will keep asking for other missions on top of that. Because I want to help.

Evie Help 5

Ryan Kraeger

Ryan Kraeger

Ryan Kraeger is a cradle Catholic homeschool graduate, who has served in the Army as a Combat Engineer and as a Special Forces Medical Sergeant. He now lives with his wife Kathleen and their two daughters near Tacoma, WA and is a Physician Assistant. He enjoys reading, thinking, and conversation, the making and eating of gourmet pizza, shooting and martial arts, and the occasional dark beer. His website is The Man Who Would Be Knight.

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