Last night Emily (one half of the IFES Team leaders) was having pre-bed prayer time with Luke (age 3). Since they'd started their advent calendar and had been discussing it, Emily prompted, "We can thank Jesus for coming and being born..." to which Luke added, "and we can thank Jesus for dying on the cross [wow: get the cross-centredness of this 3 year old!] so that we could go to... Belgium."
Emily explained that Jesus died so that we can go to heaven actually. Whereupon Luke prayed, thanking God that Jesus was born and that he died that we can go to heaven. And then added a request that God would make Belgium nicer - that people would pick up their rubbish and put it in the blue (rubbish) bags.
Was this what Jesus meant when he said that we needed faith as that of a child? He's practically grasped partially inaugurated eschatology, our future hope and our present reality!
PS
Luke asked the other day: "How could God be born?" Any Relay Workers feel a double-line-spaced 700 word essay coming on? You have til the 5th of next month. And please write in language a 3 year old will understand.
Seven Surprises of the First Christmas
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5 comments:
Is it a conversational one? I never could do those ones.
Ooh, flash back! Scary.
Yeah, we'll go with conversational: tell you what, you could say a line and I'll provide Luke's probable response. This would have to account for likely interjections of, "I want chips!", "Soldier aeroplane!" and (many times) "Why?"
And scary indeed Gareth - more than that, in Relay we could only scare Roz with bad study responses; here we could have a 3 year old thinking heretically...
(Word verification: gojoe Why should Joe go? Where should he go? Who is he anyway?)
It's great though that he's actually thinking this stuff through and properly asking questions, even if he doesn't understand the answers. My brother's 11 and he just doesn't question; he just gets bored by it which is sad... like my older sister who yammers on like she's swallowed 3 copies of the Da Vinci Code whenever my Mum mentions church.
Yes, that's sad Mike. Keep praying and living Jesus before them. I'll pray for your sis that having swallowed such a lot of DVC-type ideas God would give her stomach-ache spiritually speaking. Try to keep in touch with your wee bro as much as poss too - you probably have more influence on him than you'd think, being big bro and all. Is he into sports? My little bro enjoyed autobiographies of Christian sportsmen even though he isn't a 'reader'.
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