Lessons from a Baby #4: Imperfect Imitation

Isabella Beth Ellis, age 14 months

     Our granddaughter is almost 15 months old.  She is a very busy tiny human. She crawls everywhere and recently has begun “experimenting” with walking.  After about 8 steps, she plops down on her well-padded, diapered rear end.  She is developing in all ways as a normal, healthy baby girl.

     One of those developmental milestones is learning to talk.  While she doesn’t say much that you could recognize yet, she is beginning to attach meaning to sounds.  One of the things her parents are trying to get her to say is the word “up” when she wants us to pick her up.  So far, we get “uhh” for “up”, but she is trying!

     Our home Bible study group this past week spent a lot of time discussing how we should approach difficulties.  When we talk about the situations in our lives and the lives of others we love, we should be speaking what God says  – not rehashing the nature of the problem.   After all, Proverbs 13:21 says,

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue,
And those who love it will eat its fruit.”

     This is an area where I often fall short.  Our human nature wants to talk about all the details of our woes and rehearse all the issues that plague us.  It’s hard to put those things out of our minds and speak the things of God and the will of God as it is spelled out in His Word.  When we realize that is what we are doing, it’s also easy to be angry at ourselves for our weakness and our unbelief.

    When Bella tries to echo our words, she doesn’t get it right, but every day she is getting a little closer to saying what we say.  Are we angry or disappointed that her words are not the perfect imitation of ours?  Of course not!  We realize that learning language is a process.  We allow her the time to grow and we delight in every attempt that she makes to communicate with us.

     I think God must feel the same way.  When we fail in our imitation of Christ and His ways, God still loves us.  He knows that we need time to learn His Word and His ways and to be more mindful of our words.  The only thing that could hurt me in Bella’s acquisition of language is if she stopped talking at all – just stopped trying.  When we don’t get things right in our walk with God, we often just quit trying.  We stop pursuing Him because we don’t think we’ll ever measure up.  To a certain extent, that’s true. We’ll never get it totally right in this life, but God’s grace accepts our imperfect imitation.  The only thing that would break His heart is if we stop trying.