When your child is a budding scientist, you scrub home experiments off your walls and ceiling. Your hard-earned money goes toward chemistry sets.
In addition to milk and eggs, your grocery cart contains oddball ingredients destined to bubble and overflow onto your bathroom floor.
You are scrambling to help them satisfy a deep passion for learning and unending curiosity.
Glen was one such child.
Fortunately his parents nurtured his scientific bent. The son of a deeply religious US Navy captain, Glen and his family were church members. Glen leaned toward science as a young man and went on to study nuclear physics at the university.
Science captivated his mind and soul.
“The nuclei were responding to our questions, speaking our mathematical language, completely understandable, telling us the nature of their binding forces,” he said. “It was as if they were saying to me, ‘Finally, someone has asked us. We have waited so many eons.'”
Glen recalled being “so spiritually elated after a day at the lab that I would go outdoors and just run as fast and as long as I could, in exultation and gratitude.”
Both mind and soul factored into an important career choice.
Years later, unwilling to aid in weapons development, Glen abandoned nuclear physics and moved into a teaching career, with Ethics as his area of specialization. He did not abandon his passion for intellectual study through observation and experimentation: “My way of thinking is incurably curious and integrative. I can’t teach Ethics without attention to numerous related disciplines.”
Children are going to experience the divine in different ways. Passionate scientific inquiry is one of them.
“be passionate in your work and in your searchings.” — ivan pavlov
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Be passionate in your work and in your searchings –Ivan Pavlov Click to Tweet
Children experience the divine in different ways; passionate scientific inquiry is one. Click to Tweet
Last month a 10-year-old girl passed this note of gratitude to a childcare worker in her after-school program. The worker explains:
I was sitting around a table with four children, preparing to act out a little play, when Destiny asked me a question about God. They all heard me answer her very simply.
I don’t remember the question, but she was so attentive to my answer that I went home, wrote out what I had said, and gave it to her next time I saw her. We had two or three more short interactions about God and three weeks later she wrote this note to me:
Not far below the surface of a 10-year-old girl’s chatter about boys, who’s wearing ugly clothes, and who hurt my best friend’s feelings lies a human spirit… open and longing for someone to care.
Children look to us for direction. We adults generally respect each other by our mutual belief that we do the best we can to provide direction for our young. We understand the weight of the challenge.
Yet the children’s voices persist in their pleas for spiritual attention beyond a code of ethics:
Someone looking in from the outside would say that I had a very good family. Every material need was provided, my mother was a stay-at-home mom and she cooked good meals, and watched out for our safety. Once in a while she read to me and my brother before bedtime. We had good camping vacations in the summer. But these things didn’t feed my lonely soul. (The exposure to nature during the camping trips did impress on me an appreciation of nature, which I almost worshiped in my high school years.)
Nothing spiritual happened in my childhood—ever.
Children want guidance for what to do with their innate sense of God’s presence.
Very early on, while their purity is still unmarred, is the time to begin talking about God with children. They have automatic positive responsiveness. They sense that God exists in some form. The caregiver simply cooperates with that natural instinct to provide direction and interaction about God. It is never too early in a child’s life to engage spiritually. Yet if you miss the first windows, it’s never too late either.
What can we say about God that informs a child… yet also leaves them free to strengthen and refine their unique connection with God as they mature?
A large part of this blog’s purpose is to give you reasonable direction as you seek what is best for you in answering this– and other questions– where there is a lot at stake.
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What can we say about God that informs children, yet still frees them to refine their unique connection with the divine? Click to Tweet
If we work on the assumption that spirituality already exists inside every child, the impact we have on children even in the earliest stages of their development makes such a difference.
Many years ago I was told the story of a baby.
This baby was born to a mother addicted to crack cocaine.The little boy was born with an intense craving for the drug, and quickly went into withdrawal. He was inconsolable, crying and arching his back in pain. His mother was not available to him, as she was going through her own withdrawal.
A group of friends decided to take turns holding that little baby in two hour shifts around the clock. Even as he cried and felt pain, arms were always around him. Even when it looked to those holding him that their arms were having no soothing effect, they still held him. After what seemed like an eternity, all the drugs were out of his system and he was at peace… lying in the loving arms of his caregiver.
What difference do you imagine that made to the baby boy?
What did he learn about God even through unfair circumstances? How did his experiences shape him– even experiences he wouldn’t later be able to remember?
“As my son was going to sleep two nights ago he said he was afraid to go to heaven because he didn’t know what it would look like. I told him to ask God to show him while he was asleep. I forgot to follow up about it yesterday, then remembered this morning. This is what he said.
I saw the biggest house you could imagine and its color was gold. God was there. I saw his white robe and it had a thin, black, rope-type belt double-tied [like my son ties his sweatshirt around his waist for school]. There was grass, but it wasn’t like here below. It was taller and filled with purple, red, violet, blue, yellow and green flowers. There was a cliff that I almost went off, and there was water under the cliff. The sun was there and it shined so bright that I could only squint and open one eye.
I asked him if it took away his fears, now that he saw it.
He said yes. I asked him to give me one word of what he felt about seeing it and he said, “Love.”
Here’s someone who honored the spirituality in her son.
She listened to his description without judging. Then she checked in on his emotional state which had previously been fearful.She believed that his human spirit could handle the child-sized challenge of asking God to show him while he was asleep.
And she hoped, even with a speck of hope, that God was listening.
Tweetable:
A mom’s brilliant response when her son says he is afraid of heaven. Click to Tweet
Children look to us for direction. We adults generally respect each other by our mutual belief that we do the best we can to provide direction for our young. We understand the weight of the challenge.
