Modeling

Give me a lump of clay, tell me to make a model of a picture, and when I am done, you will probably say, “That’s nice. What is it?” Not with Alonzo Clemons. As a child, Alonzo was dropped on his head and suffered brain ‘damage’ that left him unable to read, write, calculate, or even to speak much. However, he has an insatiable drive to make clay models. If he sees the picture of an animal once, he can make an exact image of it every time without looking again.
When I read about Alonzo, I thought of parenting. You and I are models for our children in a thousand ways, for good or bad.
When I first taught 5th grade in a Christian school, we had a parent-teacher meeting several weeks into the year. As the parents lined up to talk with me, I was struck by the physical likeness of the children to their parents. But as we talked, I was more struck by the mannerisms, accents, even eye movements that were modeled in their child. If children pick up such detail, like Alonzo, without instruction, how much more will they imitate our values, character, and responses to life in the same way!
Jesus told Thomas, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” Paul said that Jesus was in the form of God and took on the form of a servant. (Phil. 2:6-7) This Greek word is morphe, from which we get metamorphosis, to change in form as a caterpillar to a butterfly. The word denotes the exact essence of a person’s nature. Jesus was the essence of the Father and became the essence of a bondslave. Frankly, to the extent we as parents are the morphe of Christ we will see Jesus Christ modeled in our children.
One of the hardest parts of parenting to me has been seeing revealed in my very young children the secret sins I thought I had covered so well! In our children, the hidden things are truly shouted from the housetop! I remember with deep regret the day I taught my son to respond to frustrations with anger. Things weren’t going well in a project we were working on together. He looked at me to see how I would respond. I failed. He is still modeling my response now, years later.
Our response to these truths could be twofold. We could rent our garments in anguish because of our own lack of Christlikeness for our children to model. Better is to humbly admit to them that we fail and are still growing. Ask them to pray for us, as we do for them. Then let’s get alone daily and tell God we realize that what they see of God will largely be seen in us, whether right or wrong. Let’s ask God to help us be a worthy model of Jesus Christ for them to imitate.