A Parable of Image Bearing in a Drunken 4 Year Old
Published on December 19th, 2009.
An Associated Press story from yesterday will not leave my mind.
Tennessee Tot Found Drunk, Wearing Dress.
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (Dec. 17) — Tennessee investigators say a 4-year-old boy was found roaming his neighborhood in the night, drinking beer and wearing a little girl’s dress taken from under a neighbor’s Christmas tree.
The child’s mother, 21-year-old April Wright, tells WTVC-TV the boy “wants to go to jail because that’s where his daddy is.” Wright says she and the boy’s father are going though a divorce.
The boy, found outside his house in Chatanooga on Tuesday, was taken to a hospital and treated for alcohol consumption.
Sons image their fathers. They were born to do so. The natural impulse of sons to bear the image of their fathers heightens the seriousness and responsibility of fatherhood. Some of how we turn out is wiring. Much of how we turn out can be understood as the organic transmission of character and qualities from our parents. Adam was made in the image of God and so are we all (Gen. 1:27; 9:6). But Adam’s son Seth was also born in the image of his father, Adam (Gen. 5:3). And so we all are born in the image of our fathers.
But ours is a strange and a fallen world. Adam fell into sin, and that’s why we read a story like this today. It’s why this boy’s father is in prison. It’s why this boy’s mother and father are going through a divorce. It’s why this mother will raise this child alone. It’s why in doing what is quite natural – trying to be like daddy – this boy was found drunk in a dress in the street in the night.
Many children in similarly difficult family situations don’t end up where he did, when he did, doing what he was doing. But that doesn’t mean the fall out from absent fathers isn’t equally as tragic and destructive wherever else they aren’t found.
And so when we read an article like this, we should pray. We should pray for this four year old and his mother, and countless others wandering in the dark in a drunken stupor – actually or metaphorically – searching for the the presence and love of a father in a fallen world. That longing is, after all, where all of our longings and strange behaviors point. May they come to know their Heavenly Father so that they may say, with the Apostle Paul, “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Cor. 15:49).
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