Fact Family, Faith Family

Yesterday, I asked in passing what the unit for capacitance was fully expecting my husband would know. He did; it's the farad.

We are a fact-y kind of family. We like numbers, trivia, and random details that tend to fall in the nerd/geek realm. This is the environment our children are being raised in. Whether they pick up on this themselves in unpredictable, but they will know that some people, their parents specifically, play with these sort of ideas and trivia. I guess in other families it might be baseball or music which have the advantage of being more mainstream.

We're fact-y, but are we faith-y? Do I have equal confidence that our children will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that their parents love and trust God? We don't tell them we're nerds; we just are. Do we need to tell them we follow Jesus, or is that also simply part of who we are?

In case it isn't obvious, I'm in a phase where I'm thinking and reading and praying about what it means to "parent toward the cross". Jesus said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." (The good news according to Luke, chpt 9). This saying is hard and fights against my sense of self-importance, but I have found following Jesus to be deeply life giving.

I want our children to not just enjoy facts about the world or even facts about the Bible. I want them to experience living water that comes from Jesus through his death and resurrection through taking up their own crosses and following Him. What will they learn from how we live?