"Kind Father, Pray For Us to Bless Today"

"Kind Father, thank You for this food and pray for us to bless today. In Jesus' name, Amen."
These were the words of my 4 year old son at the breakfast table this morning.

He’s been volunteering to say grace for us here and there lately. He even acts as my reminder when I've almost 'jumped the gun' and started eating too soon. I’m thankful for my son's appreciation for routine and I'm glad we've made praying before a meal enough of a habit that he will remind us to pray if we forget.

Most times I haven't been able to make out much of what he says during his prayer but last night and this morning I heard every word clearly. The overall coherence of my son's recent prayers at the table got me to thinking more about something I’ve been praying over for several months. That is, how do I explain God and the Bible to my 4 year old in terms that he can understand?

I’ve been praying for God to give me the spiritual enrichment I need in order to give my son a straightforward, intentional education in Christianity. But until pretty recently I've felt very ill-equipped for the job.

By now, most of my readers must know that I tend to be sort of....picky. About everything. There is hardly anything I do in my life without pondering and analyzing, "Why do people do this?" "Why should I do this?" I've been this way for as long as I can remember. If I don't understand something, if I don't understand why it is or what it is, beholding that thing will make me uncomfortable until I can make some kind of sense out of it. Or if I don't understand why I am doing something or don't understand the usefulness of a certain action, engaging in that action will cause me a great amount of intestinal distress and cognitive dissonance.

I guess you could say I dwell on things. Or go ahead and call me 'picky', I'm okay with that. It's just the way I am. So it only makes sense that I would also be 'picky' about the way God and the Bible are explained to my son. Except I don't so much consider my concern over this 'picky' as I consider it a matter that calls for great intentionality and decisiveness. I believe this is the single most important thing in my son's life. So how is it that I still haven't told him in explicit terms who God is and why we believe in Him?

So far, we go to church, we pray together, we attend bible studies and every now and then we read from the bible. I've even started doing devotionals with my son once at the beginning of each week. I believe all of these things enrich our lives, bring us closer to God and I believe my son must pick up some valuable tools and insights about God from doing all of these things. But these things serve more as a demonstration of Christian life than an explanation for why we choose it. So why do we choose it? Why does Christianity make sense and how do I explain it to him?

Questions like “Who is God?", "Why did He make us?", "What is the Nature of God?", "Why can't we see Him?", "How do we know He exists", and "Why does He care about us?" have plagued me for months and months. As I pondered over how I might answer these questions for the sake of my son, I realized that I didn't know how to answer some of these questions for myself. How was I supposed to teach my kid about the Nature and role of God in our lives if I didn't know how to explain these things to myself?

I was totally stumped. I didn't have any idea what I was going to say when my son started asking some of the more difficult questions about God. For the time being, I just hoped he wouldn't ask. I prayed that the answers would come to me in time and in the meantime, I focused on modeling the example I wanted my son to aspire to. I decided that if I wasn’t sure just yet how to explicitly teach my kid about God, at least I could be a good person to teach him how he ought to be. Right?

Wrong.

It wasn't long before I realized that being a good person isn't good enough. Being a good person isn't good enough because none of us are really good. Some people might try harder than others and maybe some are actually 'better' at being good than others, but none of us are good all of the time. None of us will ever make the right assessment, the right choice or give the right response in every situation. None of us are always shining examples worthy of our children's emulation.

In a funny turn of events, through my own failure to provide my son with a 'good example' of the kind of person he should strive to be, I had inadvertently solved part of my own puzzle. Why do we need God? Because we aren't good enough.

As parents, we will become impatient and angry with our kids. At times we might even show them our worst selves. We might do a good job of showing our kids our love much of the time, but we can never show them our love all of the time. None of us can. But one person can and does. That person is Christ. And my son needs Him for the same reasons I do. 

Even though I have indirectly taught my son how to pray, even though we take him to church and even though we try to exemplify Christianity in our daily lives as a family, I still haven't explicitly told my son who God is. I'm not panicking about this- yet. I can see that all of the prayer routines, church sermons, bible studies and devotionals have served me and my family. But I've still been unsure inside my own mind of how to make 'sense' out of God in words. I've still been unsure about how to describe (even to myself) what He is or why we need Him. Then I picked up this book: C. S. Lewis', Mere Christianity.

I happened upon it at a book sale in the basement of our local library. I knew we already had a copy of it at home. I had picked it up and started reading it almost a year ago but quit. I don't remember why I quit. Maybe back then I didn't have quite the motivation I have now to sort through some of the finer details of why a Creator God of the Universe makes fundamental sense of humanity. Back then, I was still so new in my faith that I didn't concern myself too much with being able to articulate it to anyone else. I just knew that I had seen and felt something I hadn't quite grasped or experienced before. This is what I knew:

I knew that I had felt the spirit of Christ move through my heart. I had seen the way prayer in His name was impacting my life and growing my relationship with God. In the several weeks following my first genuine church communion, I began to feel myself shedding pieces of my former 'skeleton.' Some pieces had fallen away in one dramatic break-through moment. Other pieces fell subtly without leaving any evidence that they were missing until there came cause to notice they were gone. Piece by piece, I had felt Him rebuilding me from the inside out, transforming my mind and body from the prison it had been into a sanctuary in Him, whenever I have need of it. I still didn't know why any of this made sense or how to explain or justify it to anyone else. I just knew that it was. And that was enough for me, for the time being.

But it's been pressing on me much harder lately, the need to find a way to give my son more than just 'nice habits' and good Christian values to model when it comes to teaching him about God. I'm finding that I really need to be able to talk to him about God directly and intentionally.

I'm beginning to see more and more pieces coming together in front of me. The insights I've gained from the C.S. Lewis find at the library combined with another classic book (basically an old Bible curriculum for children) have gone a long way in my mind over the past few days. I've read about the meaning and Nature of God from both an intellectual perspective and an emotional perspective. One with a rational, thoughtful tone, and one with the tone of a mother reading a bedtime story. Somewhere in the contrast of these two approaches I feel like I have finally gained some right words and insights to share with my son about who God is. So I'm thinking the next time I take my son outside and he calls my attention to the shape of the moon in the afternoon sky, we're going to strike up some pretty important conversations about God and the universe. And maybe I'm ready to start working on developing our own Bible curriculum together. Praise God for giving me this child and this opportunity to learn more about Him through being a parent.

Thanks for taking the time to read ♥