Learning to Walk, a devotional thought

There's this very tender, very poignant passage in Hosea 11, where the prophet is talking about how much God loves his people (Ephraim, the Northern Kingdom of Israel), and he pictures it as a mother or father "taking their child by the arms" and teaching them how to walk. I remember back when my children were learning to walk, how thrilling that was for me, as their parent: holding them by both hands while they wobbled ahead tentatively, and speaking all sorts of encouragement and affirmation over them, as they took every next step. And God says to Ephraim-- and through Ephraim, to us-- "I was like that with you, as you learned to walk in the spiritual life, holding you lovingly and calling you on in those next teetering steps, and the next, and the next, till you could do it on your own (and even then, I didn't let you go)."

I've been walking for a while now-- so long that I can't really remember a time when I couldn't--but Hosea 11:3 prompts me to remember those times when it was all wobbly and brand new-- life as a Christian-- and every spiritual step was a milestone and a triumph and an adventure all at once.

We must remember how he held us by the hands while we learned to walk, like that, because the problem in Hosea, is that God's People have forgotten. They figure they learned to walk on their own. "You did not realize" God goes on to say in verse 3, "that it was I who healed you." Suddenly, learning to walk has transformed into deep spiritual healing (because, after all, that's what was really happening when you were learning to walk with Jesus: you were being healed, even if you didn't realize it).  May God will keep us all from falling into Ephraim's trap, the trap of thinking I'm a self-taught walker when it comes to spiritual things, instead of acknowledging myself as a God-healed toddler.