How do you make God real to a child today? What does the child take home when you tell the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand and their table is bare? And where are your own emotions when you know Mom has cigarettes and beer, but the child has no food? How do you make God real to that child?
Does a child really believe that Jesus loves the little children when they are making adult decisions? What is a little child to them – certainly younger than eight or ten years old. By those ages they are taking care of younger siblings or being told they have limited time to decide which parent to live with. When does one no longer qualify as a little child today?
What in the world is love? Is love when mom or dad shares their bed with yet another stranger? Love certainly can’t be the way the child is lower on the totem pole than parent’s friends or drug habits! Is love the abandoned feeling when the parent sends the child off to foster care or to another relative? How do I explain God’s love when they’ve never experienced the physical love of a parent?
I remember hearing God loves us like a father. Not only is the divorce rate exceedingly high these days, but also many parents never marry. Many children literally have a sperm donor as a father – no name or face at all. Often Mom doesn’t even know who dad was. Other children are molested by fathers or stepfathers. Is fatherly love the picture these children need?
Yet I’m assured there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). So how do I share the God I know and love with this generation that doesn’t understand the language I speak?
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1 comment:
I think you reach a child by exactly what you are doing… sharing the “Good News” telling them about our loving father and expressing it through our actions. People won’t know unless we tell them. I am one that was brought up in a home very much how you described. At times God did not seem real to me. I often wondered why I was dealt such a bad hand. What changed? The people in my life kept pouring God’s word into me. They prayed for me and did not give up. Read Romans 8:35-39 God promises that nothing can come between his love and us. Nothing!
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