What My Children Think It Started With

It was the car, on the way back from the nativity, and her son asked it from the back seat the way children ask the enormous ones, while looking out of the window.

He said: so before Jesus was born, what was there?

She said, well, God.

He said, no, but what was there for people. Like, what did they have.

And she opened her mouth and found she had a shape in her head and nothing to put in it.

She knew the answers. That is what made the whole thing so strange, sitting at the lights with the heater on. She could have said something about promises and prophets and waiting. But it would have come out as a summary, and he had not asked for a summary, he had asked what people had, which is a completely different question, and it is the question of a boy who wants to know whether anybody was at home before he got there.

So she said something about how it is a long story and she would tell him properly, and he said okay, and put his headphones in.

At home she stood in the kitchen with her coat still on and thought about it.

Her children can tell the story from the shepherds forward. They know all of it. They can do the angel and the innkeeper and the star, and one of them has been a sheep three years running.

And in their heads the whole thing starts in a stable, and everything before that is a gray area labeled before.

She is not a bad mother. That was the sentence she had to say to herself twice at the counter, and it is true, and if you have arrived here doing the same arithmetic about yourself, put it down now.

Nobody handed her the older half either.

The instruction was to tell them, not to teach them

There is a line in the Psalms that people read as a command about religious education, and it is not one. It is gentler than that and it is more workable.

We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done.Psalm 78:4

Look at the verbs. Not hiding, and showing. That is it.

Not teaching a syllabus. Not covering the material. Not getting a child through a curriculum by a particular age. Showing them the things that have been done, which is what any family does with anything it is proud of, and the whole psalm that follows is a man telling long stories about people with names.

You are not required to teach a course, and you have already got everything you need to start. That is what the psalm asks for when it says shewing, not examining (Psalm 78:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the actual teacher in any child's life, which takes the weight of the outcome off a parent standing in a kitchen with her coat on.

And here is the part that changes the arithmetic. What she thought she lacked was information. What she actually lacked was permission to say a small thing.

Where the story begins, when a child asks

A child asking what was there before is asking a question with a real answer, and the answer is people.

There were people. They had names and houses and jobs. Some of them were shepherds, which the children already know is a real job because there was one in the play. Some of them were farmers and some of them were in trouble with their families and one of them hid in a cave from a king. They knew God, they argued with God, they wrote songs to God that your children have already sung the words of without knowing where they came from.

That is not a summary. That is the answer, and it is the size of a car journey.

You have a whole half of a book full of people your children would like, and it has been sitting in the house the entire time. The word says these things were written for our learning (Romans 15:4), and His Spirit is the one who makes a story land in a child rather than any amount of preparation on your part.

Nothing on this page is about to tell you what to do with your family. No plan, no reading scheme, no chart on the fridge, no evening you have to protect. Your household is yours and it is not this site's business, and anybody arriving at your kitchen with a required pattern has just handed you a second thing to fail at.

You are the right person to do this, and you were never disqualified by not knowing enough. Scripture says the words shall be in thine heart, and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way (Deuteronomy 6:6-7), which is a description of ordinary conversation and not of a lesson, and the Spirit who put that verse there knows exactly what a car journey is.