When my eldest child was losing the last of his baby teeth, my sixth baby had none. It would have been grotesque and ineffective to take one child’s old teeth and stick them into my baby’s bare gums. Babies need to grow their own teeth.

When I was starting out as a mum, I wanted to glean from other people’s experiences, to get insight into the things that matter and the things which wouldn’t. I wanted to know the battles worth fighting. This was valuable, but it didn’t change the fact that I had to work out how to love my own particular children. I have particular gifts and weaknesses, a particular husband, a particular package of opportunities and brokenness, a web of particulars given to me by Jesus. There are no shortcuts through knowing our own situation, confronting our own complications, and working out how to obey Jesus in the middle of them. We need to learn from other people, but we can’t paste someone else’s conclusions into our own life.

No one can do the bit by bit, hard-won growing for us. We can’t transplant someone else’s, we each have to grow our own teeth. One cell at a time, from digested nourishment.

We grow from the inside as we take in truth. Growth can’t be pasted on from without. We all need the same nourishment but the growth itself will look different at different times and in different places. God provides for, and sustains, that growth.

The Bible brings us ideas from outside of ourselves, which come into us and change us. As we gnaw on God’s truth, he grows our teeth.

I will mention the book of Titus in the next post (article #2). Why don’t you take some time to read the whole book of Titus, several times over (listen to it if that helps!), thinking about the connection between the salvation Jesus has achieved and the goodness he has saved us into?

Despite our different situations and our different stages of growth, if we are mothers, we have been given a weighty work. It’s a work for which only one food is adequate. Anything less than God’s Bible will stunt and starve us. Nothing else is robust enough to speak to every variable and particularity. Nothing else makes dead things alive and the heavy light.

Raising children is a work that God has plenty to say about. It is not the only grand work in the world, but if we have been given children, it is a work we may not ignore. At Light Duties, my hope is not to give you a set of conclusions to cut and paste, but to start some conversations, and to nudge us toward God’s Bible. He will grow us into the convictions he’d have for us as we feast at his table.

On Friday, in article#2 we’ll (start to!) look at the duty and light in Light Duties.