Parenting & Family Quote by Samuel Rutherford

Rutherford turns parental love into a kind of radical, disciplined gratitude, and he does it with a metaphor that refuses sentimentality. Children are not “yours” in the modern possessive sense; they are “borrowed from God,” a phrase that collapses the pride and panic of parenthood into temporary stewardship. The image of “flowers” is deliberately double-edged: beautiful, fragile, and destined to fade. He isn’t decorating grief with poetry so much as training the mind to accept what it most wants to call unfair.

The intent is pastoral but also corrective. Rutherford, a 17th-century Scottish Presbyterian writing in a world where childhood mortality was commonplace, offers a spiritual technology for survival: reframe loss as a loan completed, not a theft endured. “Thank God for a summer loan” is strikingly severe. It asks for thanksgiving not only in spite of bereavement, but because even brief joy counts as grace. That’s not coldness; it’s an attempt to keep grief from metastasizing into theological resentment.

The subtext is a critique of entitlement. To love a child as a “gift” can still imply ownership. To love a child as a “loan” is to admit dependency and limits. The line also sneaks in a warning about idolatry: if children become the ultimate good, their loss becomes spiritually annihilating. Rutherford’s rhetoric offers another anchor. By shrinking life to “summer,” he makes time itself part of the argument: fleetingness isn’t a glitch in the system, it’s the system.