Quote from Book: Disappointment with God

To understand the gain to God, think back to the images from the Prophets: God as Parent and as Lover. Both those human relationship contain elements of what God has always been seeking from human beings. One word, dependence, holds the key - the key to what they have in common and the key to how they differ.

For a baby, dependence is everything; someone else must meet its every need or the child will die. Parents stay up all night, clean up vomit, teach toilet training and perform other unpleasant chores out of love because they sense the child's dependence. But such a pattern cannot continue forever. An eagle stirs the nest to force its eaglets to fly; a mother covers her breast to wean her child.

No healthy parent wants a permanently dependent child on his hands. And so a father does not push his daughter a large carriage for life, but teaches her to walk, knowing that she may one day walk away. Good parents nudge their children from dependence towards freedom.

Lovers, however, reverse the pattern. A lover possesses complete freedom, yet chooses to give it away and become dependent. "Submit to one another," say the Bible, and any couple can tell you that's an apt description of the day-to-day process of getting along. In a healthy marriage, one submits to the other's wishes voluntarily, out of love. In an unhealthy marriage, submission becomes a part of power struggle, a tug-of-war between competing egos.