cMag0209_portWe tend to think of “heartbreak” as something that happens to the young and in love. You experience it on the road to a loving and committed relationship–before you meet your spouse, before you marry, and certainly before you have kids. It’s a risk we take to be in the game, knowing that one day the game will end and we won’t have to risk our heart on someone person who may betray that trust. Of course there are exceptions: indiscretions, separations, and divorces, but those are the unexpected. For the most part, once we’ve achieved a married status, we feel we’ve arrived. The agony and helplessness of heartbreak is this thing behind us, lost with adolescence.

But children will break your heart. Maybe it’s not the pro-life, pro-family, Evangelical Parenting Industry and Ministry message we want to hear, but it’s true. Kids will break your heart a thousand ways for years upon years.

Honey, there are terrible people in this world who will hurt you if you give them a chance. [And there’s no way for me to keep them all away].

I’m sorry they don’t want to play with you. Sometimes kids can be pretty mean. 

Oh no. Sweetie I told you not to let go. No, daddy can’t get the balloon. Look how high it’s gone. 

It’s okay. Sometimes daddies cry and don’t feel well. But I love you and it’ll always be okay. 

We don’t want you to miss the party, but this is the choice you made. Lying is wrong and it hurts people, honey. 

I don’t want her to be gone, either. She was a very good dog.

Son, this is serious. I know you have these urges and I know it feels like there’s nothing wrong with looking at it, but it has serious consequences. It changes you. It changes how you look at women.

You know the house rules. You can live here as long as you aren’t using. We talked about this. You agreed to stay clean.

If you take the time to get to know a couple with children and they let you into their private, familial world, you’ll uncover scenes like these.

Before you decide to start a family, understand that it will involve more heartache than you ever experienced in romance. This is the calling: to help bear the burdens of life and raise a child in the fear and admonition of the Lord. It’s not a thing to be entered into lightly. But it is a thing we are all called to. Whether or not we are willing or able to have or adopt children, as members of the church, we have a responsibility to join in this burden-bearing. Parenting is too hard to do alone.

Part of the church’s role in caring for parents and children needs to be acknowledging the reality of heartbreak in families. Children are a blessing from God in innumerable ways, and the contemporary movement to view children as just another Personal Life Choice, an accessory to our actualized individualism needs to be vigorously challenged, as the evangelical church has done. But when we tell the story of children and families as blessings, we need to also speak of the heartbreak. And when we speak of that heartbreak, we need to speak of a God whose own Son suffered and died for us. And then we need to care for each other when that time comes for our families, as it will.

–Alan Noble, Managing Editor