Kids & God @Home 09

doubts and fearsThere’s a temptation to teach children. In the occasional adult-child conversations about our inner lives, the adult’s focus is rather to continue opening space for the child to experience God’s unconditional love.

Conversation starter

Starting in early childhood and continuing throughout their lifetime, children have plenty of things to go to God about. Their questions, prayers and encounters with the Lord, along with the feelings produced, form the foundation of real relationship.

Main idea: For young people who approach God by using logic, you distrust easy answers to your spiritual questions and doubts.

Meditation: I do believe, but help me overcome my unbelief!” Mark 9:24.  Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who…carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest….Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart.” Matthew 11:28-29.

Let’s talk: What is your reaction to how God accepts you and your doubts?

 

Kids & God @Home 08

thinking chessNot only are children’s interests different, but how they connect with other people is different. In a similar way, how they connect with God is going to be different.

Conversation starter

Main idea: Some kids feel closest to God when they think and think, until they really understand something.

Meditation: Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord…” Isaiah 1:18.  “Test everything that is said. Hold on to what is good.” 1 Thessalonians 5:21

Let’s talk: When you’re using your mind, how are you seeing life through God’s eyes?

Kids & God @Home 03

God in everyday lifeA way to develop a child’s spiritual life and faith is found in opening yourself up to their world, in asking them questions, sharing your views, and listening to theirs. You may discover that spiritual topics are of more importance to children and teens than many of us realize. try out the question below. A four-year-old will be able to answer but so will a teen or adult.

Conversation starter

Main idea: God knows all the facts about any subject you can imagine.

Meditation: “God is greater than [your] heart, and he knows everything.” 1 John 3:20

Let’s talk: What do you wish you could ask God?

Kids & God @Home 02

Assume that children have some sort of connection with God. A friend overheard an exchange between his young son and a neighbor boy. They were talking about praying. The boy said, “I pray in my bed but I don’t tell my parents about it because they don’t pray.”

There can be benefits to including spiritual conversations in everyday life. Maybe not literally every day. Just often enough to impress that spirituality is worth talking about.

Girls prays to God Conversation Starter

Main idea: When you understand that God actually listens when you talk to him, you’ll find that God is a loyal friend.

Meditation: God said, “In those days when you pray, I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me.” Jeremiah 29:12-13

Let’s talk: When did you talk to God lately? How did that feel?

Children ask, “Why does God allow disasters?”

flood why God? The headline in my local newspaper reads, “Worst [flood] in a generation,” as the Russian River turned storm-battered towns into islands. Once again, older kids ask: “What was God thinking?” Why does God allow innocent people to suffer?

When I talk with children I draw from the thinking of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:.

God is not in disasters.

There’s a great conversation recorded in the Old Testament* between God and a holy man, Elijah. God taught Elijah that he, God, is not in windstorms, earthquakes or fires, but in the gentle whisper that heals.

We live in a physical world.

“Natural disasters,” said the 12th century sage Moses Maimonides, “have no explanation other than that God, by placing us in a physical world, set life within the parameters of the physical. Planets are formed, earthquakes occur, and sometimes innocents die.”

What do we do about it?

A better question than asking why this happened is – What can we do about it? “That is why, in temples, churches and mosques, along with our prayers for the injured and grieving, we ask people to donate money to assist the work of relief.”

We become God’s partners in healing.

“Our response is not to seek to understand and thereby accept,” says Rabbi Sacks. Instead we are the people God has called on to be God’s partners. We can say, ‘God, I do not know why this disaster happened, but I do know what you want of me: to help the suffering, comfort the grieving, send healing to the injured and aid those who have lost their livelihoods and homes.’ ”

We imitate God’s love and care.

“After an earlier flood, in the days of Noah, God made God’s first covenant with humankind. Genesis records** that God had seen ‘a world filled with corruption and violence’ and asked Noah to institute a social order that would honor human life as the image of God. Not as an explanation of suffering but as a response to it.

The covenant of human solidarity

“In our collective sadness for any type of disaster, we renew the covenant of human solidarity. Having seen how small and vulnerable humanity is in the face of nature, might we not also see how small are the things the divide us, and how tragic to add grief to grief?”  

*1 Kings chapter 19, verses 9-13. **Genesis 6:11

Tweetable: Be ready to talk with kids when they ask about disasters, human suffering, and hardships. Bullet points here guide you. Click to Tweet