What our kids know

My two year old Ben knows the ASL sign for Jesus. Thing is, I never taught it to him. Neither did my husband. Where did he learn it—Preschool? Church? One of those, certainly. 

So it begins. The wonder of what our son knows.

This is all new for us. We are in that stage of toddlerhood where every day our child is picking up new words and phrases. He loves to point to something and ask “dis guy name?” Adorable. 

But also, anything we say is now fair game to be repeated at any moment. Horrifying. And hilarious. And humbling.

Most recently, Ben has been asking to do something for “five minutes.” Wonder where he picked that one up.

There are so many things we teach our kids just because we are around them. They know what they know— because they live in this house with these parents. 

And then, there are things we can’t wait to teach our kids. This is one of the most pleasantly surprising things about parenthood. All of the best things in life— what we love and enjoy and that make us laugh, think or cry— we get to pass them along to a tiny human. 

This is why we’ve started doing the First Catechisms after dinner. We’ve been working through the first page of questions— Who made you? What else did God make? Why did God make you and all things? It is so fun to hear him confidently responds, “God made me. EVERYTHING! For His Glory.” 

This had been going on for a few weeks and then one day, Ben included his own.

“Who is greatest drummer?” 

I look at my husband— what is he talking about? 

“Dave Grohl,” Ben answered his own question.

Well, many evenings, as I make or clean up from dinner, my husband is downstairs in the basement with our son, just the two of them, watching drum solos or banging away his own at our drum set.

At two years old, Ben knows who Dave Grohl is. And when asked, he can tell you that Dave’s band is called “the Foo Fighters.”

The world as defined by our family. This is what Ben knows— drums and music and catechisms at dinner and Cashie the dog and family movie nights. 

Now, Ben has started asking us (mom and dad) to “talk about Jesus” at the dinner table. Because, of course in his mind, that’s what we do now. But one such dinner time, I asked him to tell me something about Jesus. So he said, “Jesus died on the cross.”

I responded, “And who did he die for?”

He said— and I kid you not— “for me!”

I hope I never, ever forget that moment. In the valleys and hardest parenting moments, I need to remember that little voice saying, for me.

So we are soaking it up. Because pretty soon, Ben is going to know all sorts of things I don’t know. Like, new math and the rules to soccer or the latest social media trend.

But yet, this is one of the great privileges and responsibilities as parents. To teach our children. We do it not just during dinner catechisms but with our entire lives, until our very last breath, God-willing. We teach in our living, our dying and everything in between. 

If I allow the weight of this to land on me, my heart starts to race as I think about all the things I want my son to know. How to be creative and figure things out on your own. And how to ask for help. How to have fun. The value of hard work. How to be a friend. The treasure of a good friend. The joy of reading. The joy of learning. The love of good food. When to rest. When to risk. The value of money. The freedom of generosity. The wonder of nature. How to get up after failure. And when to try something different. How to love, how to hurt and how to forgive. How much he is loved.

The list goes on. There are so many things I want Ben to know and he’s only two but the time already feels limited. I start to worry that the world is changing so fast and what I can teach won’t possibly be sufficient for an unknown future. 

And when I think about it that way— there is really only one thing I want him to know. Well, one person. I want Ben to know the real Jesus who loves and welcomes him. The Jesus who, yes, died for him, but also didn’t stay dead and will return in glory to make all things right. 

Underneath all of this is the hard, but significant, difference between knowing and knowing. I can try to teach Ben until I’m blue in the face, but I can’t really control what he knows knows. What he believes in both mind and heart is a work of grace, and not my performance.

That’s the paradox of parenting. We teach, but yet we can’t make them learn. We love our kids and we point them to Jesus. We show Christ in the way we speak, fight, repent, work, give, play, love— everything. We speak about him at the dinner table and in the car and before bedtime. There is a reason Deuteronomy instructs parents to teach God’s word diligently— when we sit, walk, sleep and rise. That’s pretty much all the time. That’s how much this matters.

We keep doing it, and then we pray. And we do it again. And we pray some more. And then we find out— our own inadequacies in parenting are actually the reminder that we need Jesus just like our children. We live by grace and walk by grace and grow by grace. The humble acceptance of Christ’s love for our own lives is the best possible teaching we could ever do.

Things are going to slip past me. And I am going to fail. And sadly, I am going to teach him some things that are not great, on accident and maybe even on purpose. But there is certain comfort in knowing that we are Ben’s parents, given to him by a sovereign God, and so we get the honor of teaching him what we know— be it about drums or catechisms.