Look at your family tree.
If one person didn’t exist— how many other people would not have existed?
For example, both my grandmothers almost died in infancy. If either of them hadn’t lived, my parents would never have existed, and therefore I wouldn’t have existed as I am, either. If one of them hadn’t lived, it would have erased the existences of her three children, her four grandchildren, and her two great-grandchildren. It would have erased all the good works those nine people did. The people they married would have found other people. And it also would have left a void for all of the medical volunteer work she did. She affected a lot of people through her actions.
If the other one hadn’t lived, it would have erased the existences of her four children, plus her thirteen grandchildren, plus her four great-grandchildren. So that’s twenty-one people who depended on her existence to exist, plus all the people she affected throughout her life with her work as a nurse, plus all the good works of those twenty-one people who never existed.
So, there’s this connection that runs through all of creation. We work with each other to do what we’ve been put in the world to do. But we also pass on our values and our priorities to those we’ve been entrusted with. And so the ripples of the effects of our work and our actions continues on beyond our lifetimes, for the good and for the bad. We watch our children learn how to be people, and find their way through the world… and it teaches us a lot about our relationship with our own parents, and our relationship with God. We serve our families with patience and love as we raise them up; we hope they serve us with patience and love when we’re no longer able to manage ourselves.
That’s not to say go out and have 100 children, because you want a gazillion descendants, or because you want to make sure someone’s going to take care of you in your old age. But it’s saying that Creation is an amazing thing, and it’s a privilege to participate in it… But unlike plants and animals (who perhaps do a better job of being cows and trees than we do of being humans!), we get to participate mindfully.
My children know they’re my treasures from God. Ultimately, although I raise them, they belong to God… and I’m going to be accountable for not doing a good job at it. And they’ll be accountable to God for ignoring the lessons I try to teach. But-- like the person who buried their treasure because they were afraid of investing it poorly and having to explain the loss-- it’s better to do your best, and trust God to make up for what’s lacking, rather than to say, “There’s no way I can be a good parent, and the world’s so broken anyways, so I’m not even going to try.” (Presuming, of course, that we’re talking about ordinary people of ordinary physical/mental health called to marriage in the first place, blah, blah, blah…)
