Coffee With A. Duck

Questions of a 4-year old Theologian

So, this morning I was finishing wrapping the neighbor kid’s Christmas present with a whole roll of duct tape, you know, the standard male fare (blog post with pictures forthcoming) when Jacob climbed up on my lap and asked “Daddy, how does Jesus get into my heart?” Wow. One minute it’s Bakugans, and the next it’s soteriology. I suspect that this was on his mind at all because while we have him expecting to get hooked up by Santa, Crystal and I have been very diligent to remind him that the reason that we are all getting presents is because we are helping Jesus celebrate his birthday. I explained that Jesus enters our hearts when we ask him to and that afterwards, he lives inside of us forever no matter what. Okay, he got that as much as he could without charting metrics and logistics. “Why is he able to do that?” Not “how”, but “why” and if you want to split hairs, those are different answers.

Now, I come from a school where answers are given as a cross between answering a direct question with a direct answer and the thought that if the child is old enough to ask the question, they are old enough to hear the real answer as best the person being asked can explain it. That said, there is no reason to over complicate simple questions with overly complex answers or deliberately trying to talk over someone else’s head, particularly an earnest intentioned child.  I posted on Facebook a quick bit about this conversation with Jacob taking place and a friend of mine replied with “The Gospel is simple. Men make it difficult.” So true; so very true. In the last year or so, I have taken quite an interest in apologetics and polemics and have been struggling with how much to tell the children directly and how much to save for later as conversations like this present themselves. I want to make sure that my children are biblically grounded, but don’t want to overly tax their minds with the arguments and defenses of adults. Those will come far soon enough; my job is to prepare them for when they do.

I don’t buy into the thought that parents should not be influencing our children’s religious views.  To the contrary, I feel that parents have a great responsibility to address these larger issues and need to be prepared with an answer when asked the reasons for future hope held by the parents. The Bible clearly teaches this in 1 Peter 3:15. In my opinion, “every man” would include the one that is being raised to become a man (or woman in the broader context of the word). I have no issue with the fact that some day he will question everything that Crystal and I have taught him about Jesus and the Bible and honestly, I hope he does question it! It’s the very important step of taking what Mom and Dad said and proving it to one’s self. It’s where the faith becomes deeply personal and is very necessary to one’s faith journey.

It’s kind of funny that this came up just now. I am reading a book called “Boys Should Be Boys: 7 Secrets to Raising Healthy Sons” by Dr. Meg Meeker and this very issue of the needs young boys and “The God Factor” was just addressed in a recent chapter that I read. I know that not everyone who reads this blog is a Christian, but before you dismiss this book as all Jesus-related propaganda, I will tell you that the following excerpt is found deep in the 10th chapter and thus far, this is the first time in this book that the author has written anything more than a fleeting reference to a faith system of any kind and that she has yet to reveal her own beliefs, relying much more on her experience as a seasoned practitioner of pediatric and adolescent medicine, than one trying to push her own flavor of religion. She uses the term “God” generically because “God” can mean different things to different people and I have yet to see her drop a J-bomb, so read the book! Really, I highly recommend it.

Dr. Meeker says that: “God makes sense to boys. Boys find it easy to imagine that God exists in an invisible state without definitive form, that he possesses both male and female qualities (God is as authoritative as a father and as loving as a mother), and that he can see everything in the universe all at once.

One reason young boys find this so easy is that they connect their inner thoughts and feelings to the exterior world. In other words, their external behaviors mirror their inner feelings. Boys feel less inhibited and less socially guarded, and are uninhibited about sharing their natural belief in God. It is not until they reach later elementary school years that they begin to force their inner selves to go “underground.” When classmates become cruel, parents divorce, or failing grades come their way, boys learn to push their interior world into a private place.”

I can’t speak for everyone, but in my situation, I feel that these statements are right on the money. In terms of seeing God in both a paternal and maternal light, Jacob has stated that he wants God’s powers so that he can stop time and shoot lightning at people (Atta boy!), but has also told me that he loves me as much as when God sent his Son to earth *tear*. As far as I can tell, he has no reservations about seeing his realities though what I’ll call a “God filter”. He knows John 1:3 by heart and concludes that since God made everything, he can control it. Call it sheltered if you want, but the people that he comes into contact with who do not share in the Christian faith are not about to start trying to correct someone else’s child (mainly because he hasn’t entered public school yet, but that’s a whole other topic). Effectively, everyone that he talks to says pretty much the same things that he does and he is not treated like a weirdo when he says something about God in public…yet.

Jacob and I spent the bulk of this morning’s session talking about sin and how it separates us from God and how Jesus died to reconcile us back to God since we can’t do it ourselves any other way than simply believing that this was the case (the answer to why he can enter our hearts). Fundamentally, I was trying to plant seeds that will one day bloom, hopefully in the form of convicting him in terms of knowing that he needs to accept that this price was paid by Jesus for him individually, not just for all of mankind corporately. As we were wrapping up, I told him that some day Jesus would probably live inside him too and because he already knows that Jesus was God, he declared “See! So I WILL have God’s powers!” and ran off to electrocute something.

As adults, I know that as my friend pointed out, we over complicate the simple, simple message of the Gospel and try to almost bury it under the added-on traditions of under the guise of “religion.” I can only speak first hand about evangelical Christianity, but so very much of what gets argued about so vehemently today in church, politics, etc. has almost nothing to do with biblical truth and yet these are where the deepest fractures within the church occur! It’s no wonder that people who don’t know Jesus personally reject the gospel; look at what we do with it!

At any rate, it was very refreshing to talk to Jacob this morning and I look forward to the next time we do it. His innocence and lack of capacity to fully understand what I was talking about forced me to strip all of my preferences and cultural proclivities away and just give him straight up what the Bible says. In the end, that’s all that really matters anyway.

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One man’s treasure is another man’s junk

No Memorial Day post would be complete without a big fat, shout out to all of our armed service men and women who routinely put themselves in harm’s way for us so that we can continue to murmur and complain about the country that they are defending.  Much of my family has served in the various branches with exception of only the Air Force, I believe.  So to the member of the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and all the reservists, thank you very much.  You are remembered more than just one day a year.

This Memorial Day weekend however, I am remembering someone else; someone I really hardly know.  His name is Bill.  Bill is an old man who has recently been moved from his home just south of Gladstone, MO to a an assisted facility as he is about 90 years old and not getting around so good these days.  It is a fate that we will all have to manage though at some point.  The reason that Bill is on my mind is that some dear members of our church are helping clean Bill’s house out of all it’s contents and preparing it all for sale, including the house.  While Bill acknowledges the need for help, he is right in feeling that the whole process is terribly invasive.  He trusts the couple that is leading the clean out, but the fact is that someone else is making decisions about his belongings in terms of what needs to be kept or sold.  Family records and pictures or other items that are obviously from the family are being sent to other relatives, but Bill has no children and his wife passed away several years ago so in this instance, the task falls to a third party.

I hate to see some of these things just set out in a $1 bin at a garage sale, especially the items that should be of some value.  I offered to help the couple doing the cleaning list some of these items on Ebay and or craigslist.com and was told that a few of these items should be worth substantial amount of money that can be sold to help pay the bills from the assisted living facility.  Upon taking a few of the items, I was surprised to learn that in terms fetching a good price, this stuff isn’t really worth much on the open market.  I don’t know if it’s just the down economy or what, but there is an old 10K Gold filled Elgin watch (ca. 1950’s) that one in better shape than the one I have to sell only garnered $24.  An old, heavy, don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-to industrial microscope Bill was a very successful chemist) only was catching prices of around $60 and the list continues in a similar fashion with rare exception (Okay, the old Kodak Stereo Panoramic Camera does look somewhat promising).

Here’s the thing that has really kept me grounded this past weekend, particularly considering that we as Americans live in such a hyper-consumerist society: we spend most of our time trying to acquire stuff like LCD TV’s and nice cars to park in front of our big houses and in the end, someone else is going to make the decisions about what happens to all of that glorious stuff, assuming our most recently acquired stuff makes it that long.  Even if unlike Bill, it’s family making the decisions for you, the decision are still not being made by us, the original owner.   It’s a very sobering thought and has made me most reflective over the past few days.  More than anything, it has made me more sure about the job that I am doing now of staying home with my kids as being much more important than bringing in money at the present time.  Really if we were to do that, is would just be to acquire more stuff while we paid someone else to raise our kids.  Crystal and I feel so thankful that by God’s blessing, we are able to make this decision to have me at home instead of having life dictate our decision to us out of survivalist necessity.  I grew up under that latter option and while I don’t regret my childhood, I am happy to pass up reliving that part of it to the next generation.  Anyway, the quote that keeps entering my head is one from Jim Eliot, a martyred missionary to Ecuador that wrote in an October 28, 1949 journal entry:

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

While that quote itself did not come from the Bible and therefore cannot be treated as such, as the pic of the journal entry shows, the context is clearly rooted in Scripture.  Regarding hoarding ”stuff”, Jesus himself said in Matthew 6:19-21

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

The Apostle Paul adds in 1 Timothy 6:7 “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.”

I do know that Bill knows the Lord, but I find seeing these passages lived out reinforcing of the truths that they contain.  Investing your life into others is the only way I know of to have a tangible impact after we are gone.  It just make me want “stuff” even less, even thought I do find a lot of it pretty cool at times.

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