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 ♥

"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 ♥

Christmas Under Construction

Each year since I became a parent, I've thought very carefully about the messages and values our family's celebration of Christmas would reflect. Last year we started a family tradition of making giving to others an integral part of our Christmas celebration. So we spent a couple of days baking, coloring paper Christmas ornaments and decorating treat bags to deliver to residents at a local nursing home. We called it our first Christmas Giving Project.

By the time our project was finished, we had learned a very valuable lesson. But it wasn't quite the lesson we were expecting. What we learned was that we had focused too much on quantity (we produced 200 bags of Christmas treats) and not enough on quality time with the residents. We had made so many treat bags that we found ourselves rushing to hand them all out instead of taking time to visit with the people we saw.
 
I think we often see a similar lesson playing out with our kids at Christmas. As parents, we put so much emphasis on making this one day of the year super-special for our kids that we wind up in much the same predicament: Realizing that we put too much focus on the quantity of things underneath the tree and not enough focus on the quality of those things and their potential for adding value to our kid's lives.

I must have been way off my game this year because early last month, I thoughtlessly planted some ideas in my kid's head about toys and Christmas that I quickly came to regret. This was the first year I actually had any good fun gift ideas for my kid. In previous years, he was either too young to have many specific interests or I was simply not excited to go Christmas shopping- or both. But this year was different. This year I was totally stoked to go Christmas shopping for my kid. Not only that, but I had grand visions of his delight on Christmas morning when he unwrapped the new toys I was going to get for him. It was going to be awesome! I was so excited that I mentioned these gift ideas to my kid one afternoon. As I did, I saw his face light up. The toys I wanted to get him are ones he's been playing with at church for months now and he was thrilled at the idea of having some to play with at home. It made me feel good to see him so happy and with such joyful anticipation. But soon things started to get weird-

Over the next few days I noticed that talk of these toys began to dominate our conversations. At first this incessant chatter about toys was just a little annoying. Then over the course of the next couple weeks, I noticed my kid's demeanor began to change. Where his mood was once generally content and balanced, he became restless and irritable. Where just weeks ago, he was perfectly content to play with the toys he already had (or none at all), he was now distressed and preoccupied thinking about when he was going to get these new toys. His desire and expectation for these toys had transformed him into a fretful and unhappy kid that I didn't recognize. 

I knew this drastic mood change in my kid was not a natural development and it was no coincidence. It was obvious that his preoccupation with those toys was responsible. And I was the one who had put these ideas in his head. I was the one who had made my kid unhappy. But I didn't know what to do about it. 

I wanted to explain to my kid that these toys were not a guarantee upon Christmas morning, but rather something he would receive only if he behaved himself until then. Before I spoke a word of this, I realized how ridiculous it is to expect a 4 year old (or anyone, for that matter) to behave themselves for an entire month. If the deal was that he only gets the toys if he is well-behaved for an entire month, then he is guaranteed not to get the toys. That is, unless I give him the toys despite his behavior, in which case I undermine the credibility of my word as a parent. I could not in good conscience set an expectation for my kid that ensured his failure, and I could not undermine my word by giving him the reward even though he didn't earn it. What was I going to do? 

I had unwittingly backed myself into a corner. Here I was, basically stuck having to buy these toys for my kid with no contingencies and no requirements of him whatsoever. It appeared that my only option was to give him the toys with 'no strings attached,' no matter how he behaved. This was the only option I could see that wouldn't make me an unfair 'dealer' or a liar in the end- All because I had led my kid to expect these toys for Christmas.

For Christmas?!! Really?!! What was I thinking?! How in the world could I have let any of this be associated with Christmas?!! 

I was so disappointed in myself. This wasn't like me. This went against every gut instinct I had had about the way pop culture handles birthdays and holidays with kids. The realization that I had poisoned my own child with hunger and expectation for something that he had never even thought to desire on his own made my stomach ache in a way that I could not ignore. I had made a horrible mistake. I had set both of us up for unnecessary aggravation and I had given my kid the least meaningful understanding of Christmas that I could have possibly given him. I had to fix this-

I decided that buying these toys for my kid was no longer an option. Buying them just didn't feel right to me. Buying them would have accomplished the same end as in giving an infant a pacifier- and seeing as my 4 year old is more than just a bundle of nerves and impulses in need of appeasing, I decided that his distress over these toys should be handled in a more constructive way. I decided my kid was capable of learning some tools and techniques for mitigating his own discomfort. If these toys were something my kid really wanted, he was going to have to put some thought and effort into getting them. They weren't just going to show up in our house one morning like magic. They weren't going to be some intangible source of desire bouncing around in my kid's head for the next month driving us both crazy. They were going to be something that we could see and touch and interact with together and we were going to start drafting plans for their construction right away.

The next conversation I had with my kid about toys went something like this:

"Kid, Mommy screwed up... We're not getting any toys for Christmas..."

"Not getting toys at Christmas?"

"Nope... We're going to make toys for Christmas.

"How do we make toys at Christmas?"

"I have no idea.... But we're going to figure it out. It'll be a Christmas project. Does that sound fun?"

"Yeah! We're going to make toys for Christmas!!!" 

We're going to make toys for Christmas??!! Dear Lord, what have I done?

Okay Tiffanie, think....

Trains...the kid really likes these silly character trains from the "Thomas and Friends" series.

Wooden trains? Could we make some wooden trains? I'm sure I won't be able to make the ones he wants but maybe he'll love them regardless of how pathetic they are simply for the fact that we made them together? Yeah, right...

He really seems to like playing with bits of hardware and scraps from the garage and our junk drawer....I bet he'll have fun just hanging out while I bang some stuff around and fail at this miserably. One can hope...
  
So I was a little nervous. Mostly I knew that this was going be a disaster, that there would be no toys at the end of it and that Christmas would be ruined for my kid forever. But I had committed to my decision. I decided I was going to have to be a great, big, pregnant-ball of super-enthusiastic-fun-ness while my son and I built one disaster-of-a-Christmas together!

Dear Lord, what have I done...
 
I had no idea where to even begin. Equipped with zero prior knowledge or experience in woodworking, I knew that anything I could make at home wouldn't come close to comparing to the trains he plays with at church. Compared to the 'real' version, our trains were going to be pathetic and he would just be disappointed. But I had to try.

When I first began thinking about what it would take to make some wooden trains I realized
that I used to know someone who would have been 
perfect for this job. Realizing how much my Pappy would have loved doing something like this with us made me miss him in a way I hadn't felt before. I can only imagine how much he would have enjoyed a project like this and I wished I could have spent this time learning from him, watching him with his grandson and building some wooden trains together for Christmas. I had to settle for borrowing Pappy's jigsaw and checking-out some books on woodworking from the library. So that's where we started.

Determined to be the most fun mommy that I had ever been, EVER, I engaged my kid in the most exciting conversations I could muster about this (doomed-to-failure) project we were going to tackle together...

First, we got online and reserved a couple books on kid's wooden toy construction at the library. Next, we picked up our books and started learning. We learned that the toy train projects in these books were a lot more complex and intricate than our tools and resources would accommodate. So we decided to just wing-it and come up with our own design. In doing so, we discovered that maybe the Thomas and Friends trains could be made more easily than we had previously thought?

We started with a pile of scrap wood from our garage, some wooden dowels, wood glue, some sand paper, a miter box and hand saw. Then we went to the hardware store to see if we could come up with some kind of arrangement for wheels and hooks for linking trains together.


                  Here is James planning to model our first train after 'James' (Engine No. 5)

Drawing some pictures of the 'James' the train while Mommy works on painting our train pieces.

                                                    Just about ready for some wood glue.

                                                                Almost ready for wheels!     
                                    

                                           Our 'James' train gets James' seal of approval!

                                  

After reasonable success with our 'James' train, our imaginative gears were really turning! James started drafting plans for more trains and over a few weeks, we set aside time every couple days to work on them together. 

  
                           James' Train Plan Portfolio

 

                                                                                              'Gordon' and 'Toby' Train Plans
 

                     'Annie and Clarabel' Train Plans                                                           

Getting Down to Business

About half way through our train building adventure, I got the idea to build some kind of train track for James' new trains. Sure, the wooden track-sets that link together and disassemble would have been a lot cooler. But I was confident James would enjoy a fixed track too. After all, he'd been happily playing with toy trains on no track at all for several months. I decided that this part of our Christmas project would be a total surprise for him on Christmas morning. Which meant I had to work through the night to get it made...

                                                             Basic Track Design Laid Out

Ready to use the jigsaw. For the first time. In my living room....(sawdust was everywhere!)


Track design cut-out, glued and tacked down to base board, with first coat of paint.

                             
                          We only got four trains made in about 3 weeks of working on them.

But we had a heck of a good time making them together!

And we have plans to make a few more this month as we're able to find time to work on them. 

So I didn't buy my kid any toys for Christmas this year- but somehow I don't think it matters. He has enjoyed drawing, talking about, building and painting these trains over the past few weeks and has been playing with each of them happily as their construction became complete. Now that he knows the kind of work that goes into making a new train (at least according to our method), when he expresses desire for a new one he thinks much more carefully about how much time he is willing to invest in it, and which one he wants to make the most. His mood has improved tremendously since my first mention of getting some new toys for Christmas. And now our Christmas morning can be about more than unwrapping new toys. 

By building these trains together, I got to learn a lot more about my kid's fascination with them just from the conversations we had. And he got to see that I was genuinely interested in helping him bring pieces of his imagination to life. I hope that his being a part of making these toys has given him a greater appreciation for them and I hope he will remember the time we spent together this Christmas season, fondly.

I have yet to finish the train track I started building but I plan on having it finished as a surprise for James on Christmas morning. I am hoping it will be a big hit!

Thanks for reading and Merry Christmas to you and yours ♥