Having the 'God Talk'

The 'God talk' with my son seems to be going well so far. His prayers are starting to become more detailed and seemingly relevant. This morning he thanked God for the "beautiful day" and I heard him mention something about "flowers" (not the most relevant for the season but I thought it was interesting that he wanted to thank God for flowers).

One of the first things my son noticed when I started to explain to him who God is, is that we call God ‘He’ even though God is not male or female. This bothers him a great deal right now but the best I could do was try to explain that God is not a person or a creature of the earth that we can see.  Therefore God is not male or female, but since our language doesn’t have a gender neutral pronoun we say “He” so as to mean the “Father Creator.”

I know this is all way above his level of understanding right now but I basically just acknowledged that it's a difficult thing to understand and that the most important thing to know is that God loves us.

I know that my non-Christian readers think I am insane right now. I don't blame you, I would have thought the same thing. The old me probably would have even considered what I am teaching my son right now a form of child abuse. No joke. I was a hardcore atheist back in the day. The old me would have looked at a mother like the one I am now and thought, "She's filling her kid's head full of lies and garbage. That poor child!" So yeah, I understand if some of you think I've gone crazy. But I beg you, resist your urge to call CPS and let me explain-

My life has been transformed by a force outside of myself and outside of this earth. Okay, maybe saying that isn't helping my case. Let me put it this way, I am finally actually living. I see the whole world and all the people in it through a new lens. It is as though God installed new brain software inside of my head and then gave me a better pair of glasses and sent me out into the world as an improved, healthier version of myself. I'll take credit for wanting to change and for seeking His help but the work He has done in me so far has been nothing short of a miracle. If this hadn't happened to me, I wouldn't believe anyone else who claimed that it did. So I won't blame you if you think I've lost my mind. I guess I kind of have...

I didn't know that I wasn't living before. I knew I had 'problems.' I knew that I was unhappy a lot of the time and that wasn't easy to ignore. I knew that I was mentally and emotionally governed and chained down by things and images, ideas and hurts in the temporal world. But I didn't know this meant I wasn't actually living. I didn't know there was any other kind of life. That is, until I sought Christ in my life. And there isn't one piece of my life or the world that I see that hasn't been changed by it. It didn't happen over night, mind you. And it's not done happening. It'll be happening all the time for the rest of my life.

Getting back to the 'God talk' with my son- He dislikes that we call God "He" if God is in fact, not a man. I explained this to him as best as I could for now and it got us onto some other good talking points about God and the Universe. I'm starting to feel more confident in my ability to navigate these conversations with him now. C.S. Lewis' words are really helping me to reconcile some of the issues I was having with explaining these things before. I can hardly wait until my son is old enough to understand this book. It lends unbelievable clarity to the question of "Who is God?" The case Lewis makes for Christianity is more compelling than any other I've heard and the words he uses fit more comfortably in my brain than almost anything I’ve ever read. Reading this book has been for my brain like being cradled in the softest, coziest bed in the world.

In trying to think of more ways to bring God into our daily lives, as I was putting my son to bed this evening I remembered that I had had to make a couple apologies to him earlier in the day. I'm ashamed to admit that I have a recurring problem with yelling at him when I'm angry. I despise this about myself and have been working very hard to develop more patience and discipline in this area. I'm not saying that yelling is always a bad thing and never warranted. Sometimes, yelling can be necessary to grab someone's attention before they are about to hurt themselves. But I'm talking about yelling out of anger. I do it too often and it's something I have to work on.

I've never been shy about apologizing to my son when I feel I've done something 'wrong' or hurtful to him. I feel really lucky to have a kid who will look at me sweetly and say, "It's okay, Mommy. You don't have to be sorry" after I've apologized. But at bedtime tonight, I took the opportunity to apologize again and to explain that while I appreciate his sweetness, I actually do have to be sorry. I explained that being sorry means that I want to improve in the future. I told him it makes me feel good to know he forgives me but that I'm still sorry. I told him that my yelling at him out of anger is a bad thing for me to do and that I should try my very hardest not to do it. I didn't get into the terminology too much tonight (repentance, sin, etc) but I emphasized our need for forgiveness and feeling sorry when we do something bad or hurtful.

Then we sat together while I prayed out loud and asked God for forgiveness for losing my temper with my son. I asked him if he wanted to pray and he said he did. I was so touched and encouraged to hear his prayer reflect his regret for doing the thing that prompted my yelling earlier today (he had damaged something very important to me). 

I'm almost in disbelief at how my son is responding to all of this. I'm not sure why I thought this would be such a difficult thing to do. I guess I was just nervous that maybe I didn't really believe that God created the Universe and mankind and that I wasn't going to be able to say these things to my son without having a brain aneurism. But as I've read further into "Mere Christianity" I realize it's not that I didn't believe God created the Universe, it's just that I didn't have a coherent and rational explanation for why this makes sense. I just didn't have my brain ready to present the case yet. I'm so incredibly thankful for coming across that book again. The timing could not have been better.

Thanks for reading ♥