When You Need Your Child To Know God Not Just About God

We'd sit on the couch for the better part of an hour – before jammies were swapped for shorts and a t-shirt – snuggling and remembering when this gangly boy, who stretches to my shoulders, was two and three and four and couldn't get enough of my snuggles.

"I remember when I didn't want our snuggles to end," he'd say.

And there we'd sit intertwined, his sisters and brother running through the back yard.

It'd started with a journal entry and a prayer for him on this morning, before sleepy eyes opened and fatigued bodies wandered upstairs. A prayer that words could not contain for a life so beautiful, yet not fully mine.

You realize that when they're ten – how their outcome is really not yours to determine, no matter how much influence you've had. You realize it's time to step back, let the men step in and to leave plenty of room for mistakes – and for God.

And I'd pray for that to happen and for his heart to grow into one after God's own and that I'd trust God's provision over his life.

And I don't know what this looks like or what it means to become less so his father can become more – more of a role of his Heavenly Father for him – so I pray that God do it in spite of me. Oh please, do it in spite of me. 

Because this quickly growing child doesn't want to read a devotion in the morning and has gotten out of the practice of reading his bible at night, but he has all the right answers. And I wonder if he knows because he's been told or because he's tasted and seen.

We'd talk about God, sitting their together, but only after we'd jump in puddles, play backyard soccer  and giggle, all the while snuggled on the couch together.

Then we'd talk about how vast God is, how he can be in today and yesterday at the same time. That a thousand years to us is a day to Him and how His ways are not our ways nor his thoughts our thoughts.

And I'd ask, in the context of God's greatness, if it made sense that we, human beings, should know and understand the mysteries of God before we should believe?

"Well, no." He'd say as though completely absurd.

How can we, in our finite minds, understand a God who is not measured by time or space, as we are?

No, we'd agree that we have to believe in the greatness of our God in order to know. And when we do put our trust in Him, the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to more than we could have ever seen on our own.

And I'd quietly entrust his heart to God again right there.

We'd do this talking for the better part of an hour and I wouldn't need to tell him how much I desire he grow in relationship with Jesus, not just know about Him. I wouldn't need to tell him because we would have experienced relationship, just then, in a way I would want him to experience relationship with Jesus, and he wouldn't want to get up when I asked if he was ready to get dressed for the day. So we'd sit snuggling and talk some more, like he didn't want it to end.

And I think that maybe this releasing will draw him closer to the heart of Jesus – just sitting with him, reminiscing, giggling and talking about the wonders of God – closer than all of my instruction and trying, stacked up to heaven, could afford.

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