Wholly Dependent

When I was a child, my mom was called to my school to confirm that my dad was indeed a fireman at the White House! I wish I could remember what your grandma said to me.

I do remember that it wasn’t the last whopper of a lie I told at school.  Fortunately, I wasn’t the only liar, liar, pants on fire on the playground.

Kids are going to tell you all sorts of stories. Your mom and dad started down this path with the two of you when you were probably too young to remember. I remember taking bites out of cookies we’d baked as a family, and picking up the reindeer food off the front lawn before you woke to the presents that Santa had brought for being “good”. We tried to take you to see the Easter bunny too.  But one, if not both of you were scared of that oversized, giant-eyed, floppy-eared lagomorph.

Then one day we were convicted of our roles in accordance to scripture. On that day, your mom and I made a decision to always tell you both the truth and to answer your questions truthfully. Unless of course, we thought that you were too young to understand.  At which point we would tell you to wait until the appropriate time.

That’s why, before you both entered grade school, mom and dad became the present bearers, the people who gave you money for that swallowed tooth, and the ones who pointed you to the resurrection of our Savior, and not a fictitious over-sized bunny bearing chocolate eggs on Easter.

As our pastor told us on that day we became convicted of the “little” lies we perpetuate throughout a child’s life…if they can’t trust you with the small things, how can they trust you with the big things.  We too, like he and his wife, wanted to be able to look you both in the face and say, “mom and dad stand for and represent the truth”.

When the kids on the playground grow up, the lies don’t stop.  Even well meaning Christians who profess the truth, tell stories that distort the truth…your mom and dad included.  We all fall short of perfection. Fortunately, we have the perfect, holy inerrant Word of God to guide our life.

We pray that you’ll be given the Spirit to discern truth from heresy. That you one day by his grace, his mercy, his Spirit come to believe what he says will bring you eternal communion with him. That you choose to place your trust in Christ, the only way that will keep any one of us from the very real, scripturally true place where his glory is absent, and where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, forever and ever.  We pray that being set apart from common secular traditions will ultimately pave the way to finding peace and comfort in the then and there and not in the here and now.  We pray that we both set an example of compassion as we work to humbly stand for biblical truth and always speaking that truth in love.

Ephesians 4:11-16

11 And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, 14 so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.  15 Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.