Children. We have children, and we delight in them. Now we also have grandchildren. And great grandchildren. We delight in them too!
Our first children – J and C – were born in the 1970s. Then we were faced with the question – how many children should we have? We were delighted with our children, though there was quite a bit of work involved! But we were wondering about how many we should have.
We were reading through the Psalms in the Bible, and we came to Psalm 127, verses 3-5:
3 Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate
Psalms 127:3-5
So, children are a heritage, a blessing, from the LORD. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them. Wow! So children, all children, are a blessing from God! But it never says how big the quiver is! What is a ‘quiver’? It is the pouch in which a warrior in those days kept his arrows, his ammunition, ready for battle. The idea is that your quiver should be full of arrows. Which makes sense.
Note the picture here. It is a military picture. Arrows are needed when facing an enemy, a scene of trouble, of difficulty. When facing an enemy, a hard time. Arrows are there to defend yourself in a hard situation in life. We all know that life is a struggle, and there are many times when we have to be able to cope with the difficulties of life.
Children are like arrows. They can help us to cope with the stresses of life.
So how many should we have? Who decides what size the ‘quiver’ is? It is quite obvious that different couples have different numbers of children. So, what is right for us?
Well, for us, an obvious place to start was to ask God for His opinion on it. Which we did. In prayer, for quite some time. The solution that became obvious to us, is that God had spoken about a full quiver, but had not given us the size of the quiver, so we thought that it would make sense to let Him work out the detail of the number, and we would keep having children until they stopped coming. Which is what we did.
Our youngest, D, was born in 2002. He was our number 12! We can honestly say that we changed nappies for thirty years!
But children are hard work. The first is hard. We were learning how to look after children. Then the second. More work! The third was more work. But after that it evened out a bit. We could ask number one to help with stuff, which she was usually happy to do. Kids love being part of the family! But it was still hard work for a lot of years!
By the time our youngest was born we already had five grandchildren. Now there are twenty seven, though one isn’t born yet. And three great-grandchildren. We consider ourselves richly blessed with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Deeply and richly blessed. Psalm 127 was completely right when it said that children are a blessing, a heritage, a rich gift from God! We thank God for them, with our whole hearts.
© Copyright Willem Schultink