Aug 11, 2014 | Direction
How do we introduce God in our conversations with young children? How do we do that in a way that informs, yet leaves the door open to explore and journey and be curious as they grow up?
Here is a description of God that may prove useful, written in a child’s vocabulary.
This view is acknowledged in every area of the world from sub-Saharan Africa and tribes in the South Pacific to urban centers in Europe, farms in the Americas, and Middle Eastern deserts.
It is not the view of a particular religion, yet is found in the majority of world religions. It is mainstream.
Who is God?
God is a being. God does not have a body. God is invisible. People are beings too—human beings. God is a being who is greater than human beings. You can’t see God but you know He* is there. God has always been there.
God is love. All love comes from God.
God knows everything. He knows what will happen in the future. God knows what you are thinking. God knows all the facts about any subject you can imagine.
God is everywhere at once. He is not limited by time or space.
God does only what is right, good and just.
God has no beginning and he has no end.
God is pure. There is nothing evil about God.
God has unlimited power and authority.
God never changes. He is the same today as God has always been.
God is one-of-a-kind.
God makes himself known by displaying these qualities so that any child can recognize them. The human mind cannot understand God completely. God exceeds our brain’s capacity. But you can understand a lot about God.
*God is spirit, but I use the male pronoun because it is what I encounter most often when people talk about God.You may substitute the female pronoun if you wish.
Tweetables:
- God exceeds our brain’s capacity but we can understand a lot about God. Click to Tweet
- God makes himself known by displaying qualities in the world that any child can recognize. Click to Tweet
Aug 4, 2014 | Direction
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
Tweetables:
- 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
Jul 28, 2014 | Nurture
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.
Jul 21, 2014 | Direction
At some point, every child understands a moral directive and does the opposite. This is a defining moment in the child’s life. This is when they (subconsciously) ask us, So what? Why should I do the right thing? What difference does it make? We are keenly aware that we give the answer to these questions by what we do ourselves more than by what we tell them.
Reflect for a moment on why you do the right thing.
Why do you obey traffic laws? Why do you tell the truth? Why do you follow instructions from flight attendants? Why do you file your taxes with honesty?
to avoid unpleasant consequences?- it’s how I was raised
- I draw on spiritual strength
- it gets me more of what I want
- to get to heaven?
- because __ said so (the law, the boss, the church)
When we take time to reflect on the meaning of our choices, we become clear on the direction we are giving children.
Your internal motive for why you do what you do shapes, both directly and indirectly, the framework your child uses to answer, “So what? Why should I?” That message becomes part of their hard-wiring for years to come.
Tweetables:
- At some point, every child hears a moral directive and does the opposite, a defining moment in the child’s life. Click to Tweet
- When we reflect on the meaning of our choices, we become clear on the direction we are giving our kids. Click to Tweet
Jul 14, 2014 | Direction
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.
Tweetable:
What can we say about God that informs children, yet still frees them to refine their unique connection with the divine? Click to Tweet
