My children love that song. If asked, Sam will 99% of the time say it is his favorite. Lukie even knows all he words. One of my favorite memories is of Sam and Tyler in a Toddler Tumbling class at the Kroc Center and the teacher, Debbie, asking the kids to pick a song to sing under the parachute-thingy and Sam yelled out: Jesus Loves Me! And after they sang it, said to sing it louder (and they did!). It was precious. One of those proud "that's my boy" moments.
I have a Cedarmont Kids Bible songs CD (full of old-school favorites like "Onward Christian Soldiers", "This Little Light", etc.) that the kids will spontaneously burst out in. We LOVE to dance to it. And Lucas, somehow, loves to sing "Do Lord" ("way be-yond the bluuuuue"). It's precious.
Teaching children a song seems relatively simple: repetition, sing along, make it fun. Sam and Tyler have already learned a slew of Christmas songs this season (yes, we listen to music a lot). Teaching children to understand Jesus is a little more tricky. I know repetition is key here too but it seems like the message can be a little more complicated than just the lyrics of a song. Let me just clarify: I am not trying to teach them the finer points of Calvinism or why I love the Heidelberg Catechism. The Trinity alone is a tricky concept! Sometimes I refer to God, sometimes I refer to Jesus (we haven't really broached the Holy Spirit). How are they to understand they are one and the same? And how can they understand God as a loving Father when so many of the stories in the Bible are about death, destruction, persecution, and other awful things? And how do I as a mom teach them these stories without scaring the crap out of them? Even the Jesus Storybook Bible (which I love) is perhaps a little more geared to a 6 year old child, than my 4 and 2 year old buds. Again, let me clarify: I generally skip over the grisly specifics of the various "boo boos" in the Bible and try to rephrase it so so they understand the message rather than the specifics of the story. But it's still hard!
Then last night, after reading about Saul's conversion in the Jesus Storybook Bible (the Jesus Book as they call it), Sam, Tyler and I had a very interesting conversation about God. They were asking about where God is and how they think he's in the clouds. And how we should go in an airplane so we can go see him. And how the birds probably get to see him because they fly up there. And how the clouds are fluffy. And then we were talking about Saul being blinded and if that hurt. And how Ananias was a nice friend to help Saul to Damascus. And if God get's boo boo's.
It was a 10 minute conversation that I found challenging (to explain questions to them in a way they could understand -- like how can God see us if he doesn't look through the windows?) but riveting too. All those hours in Little Lambs, at Story Hour at Coffee Break, at our house / grandparents houses / etc. -- all those hours are adding up. And all those hours -- hurrying them along to eat breakfast so we can be on time to church, hurrying through a story at night so they would just go to sleep already -- have been totally worth the extra energy to make all these things happen. Isn't this the greatest desire of a Christian parent?
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