Question: Where did you get your mental/emotional/spiritual/social blueprints on how to build a Christian home?
A friend of mine is a first-generation Christian. Aside from a few moments in college, a week of VBS was about the extent of Christian education–there were stickers and crafts, she remembers.
She started following Jesus when pregnant with the youngest of her three kids. As a graphic designer, she told me, she loves visual examples.
But on an intimate, day-in-day-out level, she had zero.
So I asked her about what it was like to build a Christian home from the ground up. Because, y’know, trying to shape a Christian home even when I’ve had stellar parents occasionally still feels like I’m trying to shape a 757 using an empty Coke can and some baling wire.
And my friend affirmed my suspicions: When your “normal” isn’t a family who loves God, raising kids to do that can be straight-up intimidating.
The Water We Swim In
There’s a joke about an older fish who asks a couple of younger fish, “How’s the water today?”
One of the younger fish turns to the other. “What in the world is water?”
For all of us–healthy homes or not–a challenge in taking the next step toward maturity is first to identify what wasn’t healthy about the water we swam in, so to speak. But then we also have to find new habits, new normals, to replace them.
Allow me an intellectual moment here. James K.A. Smith describes two psychologists’ work on automaticities—unconscious habits:
We can acquire automaticities unintentionally; that is, dispositions and habits can be inscribed in our unconscious if we regularly repeat routines and rituals that we fail to recognize as formative “practices.” So there can be all sorts of automating going on that we do not choose and of which we are not aware but that nevertheless happen because we are regularly immersed in environments loaded with such formative rituals.*
Yes, there is a lot of intentionality that goes into forming a Christian home. But yes, there’s a lot we pick up–or don’t–through the water we swim in.
And those “automaticities” don’t just stop with our kids. As an ancient Jewish quote reads, “When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.”
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
This is why Deuteronomy 6:6-7 describes parenting kids so holistically, so constantly:
These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.
I’m hearing that first, a Christian home starts in our own hearts. As my friend told me, “You can’t roll out what you don’t have.”
But I’m hearing that we’re incorporating Jesus and biblical truth in the car to lacrosse. Around our cereal bowls or burnt pans of lasagna. It’s the first thing of the day; the last thing. And woven into all the stuff in the middle.
This is us making disciples starting in the circle right around us (see Acts 1:8). The people closest to us in proximity and intimacy.
I’m guessing you’re lookin’ for practical ideas, not just a lot of theory! So if you want, hop over to FamilyLife.com, where I’m writing about this today. Check out A Christian Home: Where Do I Start?
(Have a friend who’s new to Christianity and could use a little help? Maybe this article is a good one to pass on. There’s a post on homemaking, too, if you could use a leg up.)
(On a super-fun personal note–this week I taped a couple of broadcasts for FamilyLife Today. They’re due to air in October, I believe, in tandem with the release of Permanent Markers: Spiritual Life Skills to Write On Your Kids’ Hearts. I am so pumped. If you’re into practical ways to help kids love God, you can grab the first chapter of the book in the sidebar of this blog.)
A “Christian home” can sound like a lofty goal–like a label we work to deserve. But ultimately, a Christian home is one actively bathing itself in what Jesus has done for us, and letting it permeate every room, every convo in the bathroom or the kitchen, every nightmare and swimsuited run through the sprinkler.
Hope this article helps you dig in.
James K.A. Smith, You are What You Love, Grand Rapids, Brazos Press, 2016), 37.
