Nurture children
through seeing what the 
FATHER does
To reflect consciously the heavenly Parent is to express God’s healing power.

Channing Walker
WHEN ONE OF MY SONS was about two, he developed a painful ear infection. My wife took the lead in caring for him. She prayed to reflect more of the love coming from God, who is both the Father and Mother of us all. She knew from experience that when she deeply felt the realness of God’s love, she would witness the power of God—of divine Love itself—surpassing a merely human capacity to love.  God’s power would do the healing. So she persisted. Then—and this she finds difficult to put into words—she suddenly felt a strong sensation that seemed literally to push out her fears and concerns and whisper to her, “He’s healed.” She was awestruck. She found that our son was well. The healing was complete in that instant and has remained permanent.

Our capacity to nurture children—including healing them through prayer—wouldn’t be sufficient if it came from us personally. But it doesn’t. Christ Jesus’ words tell us that human capacity, in and of itself, is never enough. Yet seeing what the Father does and yielding to His government open a grander capacity. Jesus said: “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth.”1

THE SON SEES what the Father does, and the Son does so himself. The Father loves, the Son reflects His love. The Father heals, the Son manifests God’s healing power. The Father knows and cherishes and cares for every one of His offspring. The Son sees this and expresses the Father’s caring. He can’t help doing so as the image of God. Is this true for us, too? The Bible says that we’re “heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.”2 We’ll get a much bigger sense of what we can do, including a more effective job of nurturing children, when we first look to the Father, and then claim our capacity, as His image, to express Him.

As we realize that we reflect the divine Father-Mother, we begin to see more of what He does and what we can do. A great example by a parent—one who is consciously reflecting the heavenly Parent—is one of the ways we can know of God’s care for His children. For instance, parents can express love for their children that reflects the purity, constancy, firmness, yet gentleness of divine Love. They can live so that what their children perceive in them awakens in the children more of their natural capacity to succeed, to shine with God-given talents. Parents can insist in prayer that a life marked by divine good is riveting to look at and emulate—far more riveting than the trash of worldly examples.

That sounds as if a lot rides on our example. What if our worst days get noticed and our best ones are blinked at? Will we ruin our kids? Happily, something more reliable is going on. Here are two facts to remember: 1) God is. 2) God does. God is both Father and Mother. In the truest sense, God does the fathering and mothering, the tender nurturing, the patient loving, the unwearied lifting up. We are His expression, the object of His love, the recipient of His free gifts, the audience for His display of good works. These spiritual facts don’t dismiss us from parental duties. They underpin our best endeavors. Then we do better still. We see—we behold more of the universal Parent. We do—we reflect Father-Mother God. 

It’s a winning approach. It’s better than wrongly believing we’re a channel, as if God and His goodness somehow have to flow through us in order to reach our children. Never! What if the channel became clogged or polluted? Maybe loving thoughts but also impatient, irritated, spiteful thoughts would flow through us—pollution. Pure good might never reach our kids. However, we are not channels. In truth, we are witnesses. As we purify our thought of the belief that we’re personal creators and doers, we witness more of God’s nurturing. We see more of the direct relationship we each have with Him without go-betweens or channels.

It is because of this direct relationship that we can always glean more of who God is and of what He does. Divine Mind knows. Immortal Soul identifies. Infinite Spirit animates. Principle orders. Life invigorates. Truth nourishes. Love loves. These Bible-based terms for God all suggest action. Children, and parents, too, are known, identified, animated, by the heavenly Father Himself. 

DOES A HOUSEHOLD need more order? Reflecting Principle might take the form of setting aside, every evening, a specific time and place in the home for doing homework. Is a child feeling overlooked? He or she might feel the loving warmth of divine Love through our showing up, when possible, at the sporting events (or band concerts or debate team contests) he or she is in. Is the family starving spiritually? The continuity of Truth and its nourishment of us might find reflection in an everyday reading of the Weekly Bible Lesson3 with the kids while they have breakfast. There’s no shortage of solutions, appropriate to each family, all coming from the Mind we reflect. 

The less these approaches come from human strategizing and the more they spring from divine inspiration, the better. Remember, our parenting is at its most inspired when we’re reflecting Father-Mother God, divine Love. It’s never too soon to start spiritually empowered nurturing. Mary Baker Eddy, who poured endless mother-love into the Cause of Christian Science, offers this straightforward counsel: “Parents should teach their children at the earliest possible period the truths of health and holiness.” 4

It’s also never too late, because good is indelible and bad is always erasable. Good character, good motivation, good aspiration, good achievement, all flow from the permanent, indestructible source of good—divine Love. And since God is the only true source, evil is sourceless. Therefore, someone labeled “damaged goods”—perhaps a child from an alcoholic home—really has not suffered unhealable harm. How can we prove that? We can realize in prayer that the child (and the parent) are not the result of bad or good material circumstances. Instead, each one is the focus of Love’s loving, the recipient of Truth’s nourishing, the reflection of Mind’s deep knowing of good alone. Through the clear perception of such truths, the damage of a bad childhood begins to recede and finally vanishes from consciousness, because it was never a part of anyone’s true selfhood as God’s reflection. 

What about when children are no longer children? Is it possible to nurture a fully grown child set on his or her own course? Consider Christ Jesus’ nurturing of his disciples into the spiritual readiness needed for their ongoing mission after his departure. At one point he asked them, “Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” After they told him who other people thought he was, Simon said, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” 5 By recognizing Christ, Simon was, in a sense, seeing what the Father was doing. He was recognizing active proof of the Father’s love. Then what happened? Simon himself was seen anew and given a spiritual name: Peter. This was not some foreign selfhood installed in him by Jesus. It was a recognition of his true nature. Peter experienced nurturing at its highest and best, and his capacity blossomed. 

WE HAVE NO SELF-DERIVED capacity. We have only the capacity that comes from God. But that is a limitless capacity for good! Through this understanding, both we and our children are nourished and nurtured. We need to awaken to the divine activity, but even our awakening to see what divine Love does is Love’s doing. It is the activity of the Christ, Love’s redeeming power, rousing, stirring, engaging us—irresistibly destroying the belief in a limited man with limited capacity. This empowers us to overcome shortcomings we feel we have as parents, and to see through scars we think we (or others) have left on our children. More of divine Love’s tender care becomes plain.

A reminiscence from the early days of the Christian Science movement sheds its own light on seeing, doing, and the nurturing of children. In 1897, Mrs. Jessie Cooper, along with her two small children, were among those invited to Mrs. Eddy’s home in New Hampshire. As they listened to speeches by Mrs. Eddy and others, the children looked at Mrs. Eddy with curiosity, and she smiled at them warmly. Mrs. Cooper describes what she saw in the interchange of looks:
“It was a revelation to me. I saw for the first time the real Mother-Love, and I knew that I did not have it. I had a strange, agonized sense of being absolutely cut off from the children. . . .“As I turned . . . and walked toward the line of trees in the front of the yard, there was a bird sitting on the limb of a tree, and I saw the same love, poured out on that bird that I had seen flow from Mrs. Eddy to my children. I looked down at the grass and the flowers and there was the same Love resting on them. . . . 
“I looked at the people milling around on the lawn and I saw it poured out on them. I thought of the various discords in this field, and I saw, for the first time, the absolute unreality of everything but this infinite Love. It was not only everywhere present, like the light, but it was an intelligent presence that spoke to me, and I found myself weeping as I walked back and forth under the trees and saying out loud, ‘Why did I never know you before? Why have I not known you always?’” Mrs. Cooper found that during this experience, a large and painful boil on the head of her young daughter had disappeared.6

It’s safe to trust our children to divine care. As we come into the recognition of Love’s realness, we inevitably glimpse more of what the Father does. And what the Mother does. The substance of our nurturing becomes more the reflection of His/Her nurturing. Then parents, children, the whole human family, are blessed. 
(Channing Walker is a contributing editor.)

1 John 5:19, 20.
2 Rom. 8:17.
3 From the Christian Science Quarterly.
4 Science and Health, 
p. 236.
5 Matt. 16:13, 16.
6 See Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, formerly published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), pp. 110, 411, note 74. 
 
 

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