Also (not by any type of coincidence) I am reading a couple books on evolution. Because both of these topics were going through my head at the same time, a passage from Dr. Meeker's book stood out at me and I wanted to share it. Enjoy!
In Christ,
Jason Jasper
A Father's Wisdom
(from chapter 8: Teach Her Who God Is)
Can you remember sitting on the edge of your three-year-old daughter's bed, watching her bundled in the peace of sleep? You gently leaned over her to kiss her forehead and pulled the blankets around her shoulders. No father can adequately articulate the experience of watching his sleeping child-it must be lived. Now, imagine you are walking out of her room. Could you turn around and look at her and believe that the sum of her existence rests in a mass of cells?
Certainly not. But this is exactly how a rank secularist is obliged to view his daughter. She is nothing more than a genetic product of his and her mother's DNA. The puffing of air through her tiny chest keeps her alive. Your time with her is precious, meaningful, but purely a biological phenomenon. Her thoughts and feelings can be traced to neuronal firing in her brain. One day you will die and she will die and that will be that. Life began through the splitting and rejoining of DNA and when they stopped functioning, she did too.
I can't imagine a father feeling this way about his daughter. When you look at your sleeping daughter, you are confronted with a spiritual reality that you can't deny. From the moment she was born, you sensed the awesomeness of her life,the fact that there is something mysterious and transcendent about it, that she goes beyond you and your spouse. A man can banter with his friends and colleagues about whether God exists. But a father looks at his daughter and knows. Often I find parents (particularly fathers) shy away from discussing spiritual issues with their daughters. Talking about faith is akin to talking about sex. We feel paralyzed. We choke. We don't know where to start. Or perhaps we're afraid because we don't have all the answers. Perhaps we struggle with faith. That's fine. You don't have to provide all the answers, and you can keep it simple.
Kids always want to know about God. Their questions are intuitive. If you don't give guidance to your daughter, she'll come up with answers of her own-which means your authority will be replaced by someone else's. This is how cults are formed. You wouldn't ask your daughter to cook coq au vin for dinner without giving her a recipe. And God is more important than dinner. Whether you're a Christian, a Jew, or a Hindu, when your daughter asks about God, you need to give her something to work with. Your daughter wants to hear something from you. And for most parents, that means imparting your own faith in God, which you learned, if nowhere else, while you were watching your baby daughter sleep.
(click me)