Blasphemy

By Veronica

“There’s no such thing as…” my three-year-old blurted out in the middle of church yesterday. I don’t know what word she was going to say next – it could have been anything from unicorns to effective low-flow toilets – but I swooped her up and carried her out of the sanctuary anyway. I had a sneaking suspicion she was going to say “God.”

We are Christians and are raising our children in the faith. That leads to some interesting conversations, such as the one where my five-year-old insisted that she understood the Trinity even if no one else did. I offered to publish her thoughts and earn us a gazillion dollars, but she declined.

Other times our faith becomes the item the kids use to test the boundaries. The same five-year-old has begun contradicting me about any random thing, and sometimes the random things are Christian doctrine. “Jesus does NOT love everybody! Jesus did NOT rise from the dead!” These statements are intended to shock us, paralyzing us with horror so that we forget that we told her no more cookies today.

But instead of shock, we usually respond with calm reiterations of our beliefs, or sometimes mild sarcasm, which goes over her head. I am not afraid of my child’s apparent irreverence. That is part of childhood. When my brother was a boy, blamming away with his cap guns, he shouted once that he was going to “shoot Jesus!” It scandalized the church folk, but my parents barely batted an eye.

When my little one piped up in church with “There is no such thing as…” I did not know what would happen next. If the next word had been “God,” I admit I did not relish the thought of the handful of grouches in my church who would mutter, “Well, she must hear talk like that at home.” But I also know that my girl is just a girl, and for now, most of the things she says on that subject will be for attention, to shock me or to gain my approval.

Faith either fades away with childhood or it becomes real, something more than just the culture we inherit from our parents. I want my girls to someday believe, not because I have told them something is true, but because they themselves have been convinced. If she expresses real doubt later in life, then we will respond to it then. For now, we try to show her that mom and dad love forever, unshockably, no matter what she says or does.

And so does God.

You can find Veronica blogging at Toddled Dredge.