I haven't written in a while. Life has been busy. However, I don't plan to say my life is “busy” anymore. It feels like a curse on my time, like there's no time to fit in what God may want to fit in. So, instead, I will say my life is full. My life is full of opportunities to love and serve, to listen to His voice, to connect with people He loves, to pour out what He’s given me onto others. I thought my busy-feeling life was just a season, but then it seemed to be season after season. When I think of it in terms of “full”, it feels like I am just running the race God has set before me, with sometimes fought-for, but necessary mini breaks and full of God’s goodness.
As a way back into writing, I thought I'd share some things that have happened in my life lately and how, through them, I can teach my 5 and 2 year old about Jesus, or often, how they can teach me about Him.
My friend and mentor passed away from complications with her heart. She was a brilliant example of being Jesus' hands and feet. She left a glorious legacy here on earth. She had a lifetime of ministry behind her and in her when I met her, so she had great insight for mentoring my husband and I in the church group we lead. She always talked about and asked us to pray for her large family. She had 15 grandkids and she had a journal for each one; to remember special things in their life or what they talked about when they were together. Her love and passion for Jesus were evident. At her packed celebration of life service every single person stood up when asked who had been affected by her hospitality. Through talking about her and her death in front of my kids, they can see what a life in Christ is like and what grieving looks like. Grieving looks and acts differently in different people and I want them to know that’s okay. When I tearfully told my 5 year old that who we had been praying for had died and gone to be with Jesus, he reminded me that, “That’s a good thing.” I want them to know it’s okay to be sad to not have her example anymore, but yes, indeed, the most important thing is that she is dancing with Jesus!
There's been lots of driving to school and playdates and errands and church. One time M (the 5 year old) said he wanted to pray, listen to catechism songs, or talk about the Bible whenever we were driving on that specific road. I thought that was a great idea! I also said sometimes I like silence and M thought that was a good time to have more of our moments-of-silence we sometimes have before nighttime prayer to hear His voice. Another great idea! M and I continued to have a great conversation. He asked what evil was and I asked him what he thought it was. He thought it was doing bad things. I told him I thought it was anything that separates us from God. I said I like to think about holiness more than evil. He thought holy meant clean. I talked about the meaning of being set apart. I continued with talking about God being holy and how He can’t be around unholiness. That’s why it’s so important what Jesus did. Jesus stands in front of us, who can never be perfect, so that when God looks at us, He sees perfect Jesus. When we talked about being careful and the importance of knowing God’s Truth because Satan likes to whisper lies to us, M said he thought I was right and when I asked him why he thought I was right, he brought up the Bible story of the snake whispering lies to Eve. J, the 2 year old, often says, "He's not here, He's risen!" ever since Easter. He also has started saying, "Do not worry about your life. Jesus loves you!" He's been listening when his big brother practices reciting scripture for school! I read in Risen Motherhood about the Gospel being “simple enough for the ears of a toddler and deep enough for a lifetime of scholarly research.” What a gift the Gospel is! M and J don't always want to talk about things like this, so I grab the opportunity when it comes up and I love to tell others about the conversations. I want my boys to know that I’m proud of them thinking and talking about these things, working through things with a Gospel lense, and filling the air with Truth. When M asks what demons are or about eternal life, I choose to stop and talk about these important things. And if I don’t have a good 5-year-old-appropriate answer I ask other wise people and God provides an answer. I'm learning that it’s okay to come back to a conversation, even if they don’t remember the original one happening!
My 5 year old started out this school year in Pre-K at the school where I teach art. I’ve taught there for 7 years and this was the first year I got to teach my own child. He and I loved it! Pre-K has become one of my favorite grades to teach. Partly because of the curriculum I’ve chosen and partly because of their openness to listening and silliness. One part of the curriculum I’ve created for them has to do with famous artists and what we can learn about Jesus. As I read a Bible story to them to set up the lesson, I often get more out of it than perhaps they do. I am surprised they don’t get frustrated at how many times I stop in the middle of a story to discuss with them how Jesus acted and how we can copy Him today. I also get lots of practice coming up with Biblically based answers for questions my students have. It stretches me while growing them. I’m incredibly thankful for the opportunity to get excited about Jesus with my young students.
Someone talked the other day, about wanting to hear more about good things that came out of covid because there’s so much bad that could fill conversations. I, for one, can see good from it, along with the bad. My faith grew from lukewarm to passionate through the pandemic. Seeing other Christians despair beyond hope and not seem to have an active relationship with God when things got hard didn’t seem to fit with my beliefs. God was with us, even through the most uncomfortable, terrible parts of the pandemic. During the beginning of the pandemic, when we couldn’t get out much, I started writing this blog from the suggestion of a friend. This blog has helped me put my thoughts and beliefs more solidly down on paper, in my head, and in my actions. I can come back to what I’ve written and get much-needed encouragement and reminders for myself to keep living out what I believe. And I think it solidified my belief in the Holy Spirit, because how else could I write something like that? When my husband and I prayed for how to love and serve while stuck at home, He answered our prayers the next day with an opportunity to lead a group in a similar life stage as us at our church through zoom then, later, in person. We hadn’t done something like that together (me, not at all) so it was a great growth thing that we ended up loving because of the requirement of thinking of new ideas together. I still sometimes feel like I fail at little parts of leading, but, as I tell my Pre-K students during our “What is a leader?” unit, leaders make mistakes, it’s how they deal with them that matters. I pray that my kids see and understand how God can use bad things for Good.
My husband and I have been actively trying to pray more boldly, especially since a speaker came to our church class and taught, or really, demonstrated through his life, the impact bold prayer can have. Especially bold prayers regarding spiritual warfare. Our eyes are opening to the effects of spirits of chaos and disunity around us. We call them out in Jesus’ powerful name! We’ve seen lots of prayers answered! A friend’s missing cat. “Return in Jesus’ name!” Bonnie returned the next morning!! Another friend had an idea to help parents and kids in a specific area and wanted to explain the idea to her church but we’d been praying for her to have an opportunity to do so for months to no avail. Then she felt called to go to a prayer meeting and her prayer partner was a pastor at the church that she could share her idea with! Another time, my son scraped his knee right before a car ride home. He kept crying that, no, I couldn’t do anything to comfort him. So I surrendered him to God and prayed for God to comfort him when I couldn’t. J stopped crying right after that! It seems the desire to pray boldly is also on the hearts of those around me. We have summer plans with our church group to discuss and practice praying boldly and a friend from our small group is also interested in praying more boldly. I’m excited to see how God moves! Sometimes we pray in front of our kids. We want them to see and pick up on the fact that we can call on Jesus’ powerful name in any and every situation.
My 5 year old started soccer, practicing foundational skills with other kids his age. He’s an intellectual type and is happy staying at home, playing firefighters so this was a newish skill for him. He started out shy, just like his mama would be. His shyness and disinterest in participating continued for longer than his mama and daddy would prefer. But his running got more coordinated and by the second-to-last class he was coming up with ideas for his team’s name at the end of practice. Sticking it out to the end, even when he didn’t like it sometimes, was good practice for later in life. He may not like everything God will call him to do. It also gave us several chances to discuss respecting authorities with him. Even the little things can be good lessons to be more like Jesus, for us, his struggling-to-be-patient parents and for him. Parenting in general, is like training them to be warriors for God. Taking each thing that comes up as a way to learn to become more like Jesus, to practice for similar but different things that will come up later in life, to learn to treat others with dignity and respect.
I co-led a table at a women’s conference through my church. The day before I was asked to do it, I had told my husband I felt like a bad leader. I guess God was saying, what better way to get better than to practice being a leader! I’m so thankful that I also had friends who poured truth into me about whether or not to even sign up in the first place. It turned out well, of course, because God was at the wheel. I need to remember these times of God’s provision, because it’s so easy to forget and let the waves of worry crash over me rather than the Grace of God. My co-leader wrote “crazy confident” on the back of my table name tag in the middle of one of the sessions. A nice encouragement then has led into a filter my mind goes through now. I try to put every thought and decision through the filter of, “Is this being crazy confident in Jesus?” My co-leader understood this filter, I think, when she heard about a story of her friend praying through a translator for an Afghan refugee who ended up being healed from an 8-year long session of bleeding! “Jesus, I know you can, so if you want to, heal her!” What an awesome story, and what made it even more awesome was the timing in which my co-leader heard it. It was the day before the conference, in which the Bible story of the woman bleeding for 12 years was a focus! God is good. My kids hear me talk to others about trying to be crazy confident in Jesus. God, thank you for making them good soaking-up-what-they-hear listeners in this case!
It's often a hard-fought journey to bless my kids through teaching them about Jesus through my words and actions. Of not cursing them with labels like always being messy, but encouraging and loving them through struggles and the trials of life. When parenting well seems hard or even impossible, I pray.
Lord, open my eyes to opportunities to show You, to talk about You, to pray to You, to see You all around me in front of my kids. Give me courage and insight when to and how to talk to my kids about certain topics. Open the hearts of my kids to You and to what You want to show them.
Amen.