church kids

If you hang around this blog (and I hope you do) then you might notice that I'm somewhat cyclical. I mean, I muse on things and then a year later or whatever, I muse on them again, maybe with the wisdom of another year, or the reckless abandon of having blown it before. Even ol' Solomon said there was nothing new under the sun. Although, Solomon was crazy depressed as a result of having like a thousand wives, so maybe I shouldn't weigh too heavily on his opinion. I've been depressed before, and I know it tends to skew your views on things. Have you ever tried to cheer up a depressed person? They're all like, "There is no sun." and even when you're like, "Hey, look up there at that giant ball of gas and fire that only avoids frying us all to a crisp by like one degree!", they aren't encouraged. Like that.

Sometimes I get a little sidetracked by my intro paragraphs. The point is, today I was thinking about something I have thought about before.

We were driving merrily along on a straight shot to VBS, and I had their kid's praise CD blaring. Parenting note: it is better if you never let children know that there is music specifically designed for their aural taste buds. Then they just like your music. I've made it 13 years, but I blew it. I put it in, and they got all excited, and I am hoist by my own petard.

So they're shouting JESUS and spelling it out and singing about joy deep down and so on, and I'm flashing back to my entire childhood, singing these sort of songs. And it hits me again, I am raising church kids. Which is fantastic. I mean, they are learning the Bible and about loving other people, about the power of God (well, a itty-bit of the power of God) and so on. The thing is, I went to all the camps, and the Christian school, and church a jillion times a week, and I'm so thankful. I feel like if someone cut me, I'd bleed Scripture, even if I barely read my Bible now... there's a foundation that made me.

Somehow in there I had a genuine experience with God, a salvation experience that made the whole thing personal. I have 2 days I can point to, but in a lot of ways, it was a long-term growing process and it's hard to nail down a beginning. A lot of my friends were right there by me, hearing the same things, responding to the same altar calls, doing the same hand motions, and it didn't stick. Something went wrong, or never went right, and I don't know what the difference was. A lot of them have come back around as adults, but there were years of wandering.

How do I point my kids in the right direction, even push them a little into things I think will help them, and make it genuine? How do I help the surface, which is great, go deep? And then there's the whole element of how do I raise holy kids who aren't afraid of broken people? 


And how do I get rid of this CD?