Many parents love their children, but few parents know how to put that love into constructive action.  What I mean is, sometimes we think we’re loving a child when we’re actually harming her.  Love is not as simple as a kiss on the cheek or handing them 50 candy-bars a day just to appease their wishes.

Not being a parent myself, I can not assume I would be any different than countless well-meaning parents in Chicago – and my heart goes out to folks doing the most important work in the world, raising up the next generation.  It IS the most important work…which is why this question must be asked…

What does Love do?

I look to the perfect picture of familial love – the Father God and his Son Jesus Christ.  Review the Gospels to find what the most beautiful, ultimate parenting skills look like in action.  Re-read the Gospels with the eyes of how God ‘parented’ Jesus, and you may find that the Love of the Father sends his Son into Mission.

I’ve seen some parents walking down the street with their two-year-old running about 20 feet behind them, frantically trying to keep up; I’ve seen other parents let their kids shoot ahead of them unawares, running at full-speed toward busy streets, and still others keep their kids on leashes, never leaving them out of their reach (with literal leashes~ or a GPS on their teen’s cell phone)!

Watch the Father keep his Son intimately close for years, teaching him who He is and Whose He is.  At twelve years old, Jesus has a better grip on his identity and his mission than most adult Christian leaders.  Speaking to his earthly parents, who had LOST HIM at a city-festival, found  him in the Temple, and Jesus’ pre-teenage voice, cracking as he plainly said, “Why are you looking for me?  Didn’t you know that I must be where my Father’s work is!”  Potent — both intimacy and mission wrapped into one sentence…(Lk 2:48-50)

As Jesus’ life progressed, he was sent out as the Light of the World, doing incredible work and breaking through the hardest barrier in the Universe – the human heart.  Even still, as a Good Father, God was ever-present and affirming of his Son, attuning regularly with Jesus in times of intimate prayer and communion.

And it is in fact, the same relationship God hopes for all those chasing after the Jesus-Way.  We have a real opportunity to be “Fathered by God” – to find our true identity, and our true purpose and mission in life.  There are enough voices vying for our hearts and our dollars in this culture – it will take focus and intentionality to be fathered by God, but its worth it – not just for your own life, but for your children’s.

More often than not, it is messy dance of back and forth.  It is ambiguous victories mixed with incomplete failures.  I don’t know half the time whose side I’m fighting for – and often it feels like my efforts are doing more harm for the Kingdom than good.

Why all this self-doubt?  We’re getting toward the end of Lent, and I realize each year that no matter how much purging and confession and buffeting I do to hone myself closer to the Living God, there is simply no way to transcend the fact that I’m a person who will also be mixed with the spiritual warfare going on all around us. At times I pick up the flag of the enemy and run in the opposite direction, hell bent on destroying everything I desperately want to see accomplished in God’s work here in Chicago.

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement once said:

“What we do is very little.  But it is like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes.  Christ took that little and increased it.  He will do the rest.  What we do is so little that we may seem to be constantly failing.  But so did he fail.  He met with apparent failure on the Cross.  But unless the seeds fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest.”

Being a missionary isn’t a neat and tidy job, but then again, Jesus had a fine time living in ambiguity and failure.  That brings me peace.

Abraham had this sort of hutzpah when he came before God and began negotiating with him in Genesis 18:22-33.  The fear…the absolute penetrating fear of standing before the Living God and questioning him!  And yet, God was pleased with this kind of faith – in fact, we call Abraham “the father” of our faith.  It is in large part because he had real hutzpah.

Jesus too mentions the notion of hutzpah, this wild, brazen gall – promising those that “seek and keep on seeking will find; those that knock and keep on knocking, will have the door opened…”

He tells a story of someone banging on the door of his friend’s house in the middle of the night, demanding the friend get up and get him what he wants.  It isn’t necessarily out of kindness, but out of sheer exhaustion that the friend will do exactly as he asks.  It is this strength-in-persistence that Jesus says qualifies as real, healthy faith.

What might a hutzpah faith look like today?

• It is praying…without ceasing.
• It is this borderline STUPID insistence that God cares enough to respond to your requests.
• It is begging that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, then going about in God’s power, being the answer to your own prayers.
• Want to see heaven on earth?  Then put your whole life on the line to see justice accomplished, to see salvation for the oppressed, sight for the blind…
• Pray desperately for more workers in God’s harvest fields, as there is so few workers and so much work to be done.  These are things that God wants far more than you ever will, so go ahead and pray boldly – then go about seeing it done!

Don’t forget, when a child asks for bread, his father will not give him a stone…and how much more wonderful is God?  When we pray with hutzpah; when we ride the line between audacity and reverence in our prayers…we can see the boundaries of hell pushed back - and God comes rushing to our aid.