teach your children...

Alternately: In Which Katie Interacts with Culture for the Second Time in One Week (crazy.)

So, in my semi-sphere of the internet, there has been a bit of an explosion over a certain pastor's post on Twitter:

And the traditional evangelicals/Calvinists are all singing PREACH IT! And the everybody-elses are all begging him to STUFF IT! (and then expressing sympathy for his kids)

Probably the most emblematic negative response is in a post by a woman named Elizabeth. Among other things, she says:

Tell your children they are whole.
I still struggle every day to believe God loves me. This is because when you teach a child they are unworthy and somehow intrinsically broken/flawed/less-than, you set them up for disaster–not just in their relationship to God but in their relationships with people.
...When I sincerely believed I was broken/bad, it was nearly impossible for me to receive God’s grace and love. When I believed I was inherently broken, I stayed in relationships and situations and churches that caused me long-term pain because I didn’t believe I deserved better.

Yikes. I have struggled a lot between my Westminster Shorter Catechism days and my Catechism of the Catholic Church days regarding the idea of Total Depravity. The idea of I Am A Worm And Deserve All Things Bad.

How do I balance the fact that I do believe that I am sinful and was born that way, à la St. Augustine, with the fact that I do believe that I am redeemed and should act that way, à la Augustus Toplady?

More to the current point, how do you teach that to a child without getting his head stuck in the mire of believing himself eternally unlovable?

Grace.

You can't understand the gift of something you didn't deserve until you understand that there are good things you don't naturally deserve.

You also can't understand the gift of something you didn't deserve until you understand the Giver, whose whole desire is to give good gifts to His children.

I think my parents did this very well. I still remember very vividly the day I stole gum out of my mom's purse. She caught me, reclaimed the gum, and told me stealing was wrong. I remember waiting for Daddy to get home. What was going to happen? erk.

But the punishment/lecture I was sure was coming didn't. After dinner they sat me on the counter, told me that grace was when someone who loves you gives you something you didn't earn, and let me have ice cream for dessert.

Mind. Blown.

So don't just tell your kids they are 'deeply broken.' And definitely don't treat them that way. But also don't tell your kids they are perfect. While I doubt this is what she actually does, Elizabeth's post makes it sound like she's teaching her children that they are whole and a-okay as they are.

No. Teach your kids that they are not God. (That's a big step, especially for the firstborn.)

And when they sin (they will), identify what they've done as sin.

And then love them anyway.

Because a kid's first idea of God comes from the parents. And when they see themselves sinning, and see themselves loved, they're not thinking in terms of broken/whole. They're thinking in terms of gratitude, which is the only proper response.