DADS READ: "The BOY and the OCEAN" by author Max Lucado and illustrator T. Lively Fluharty

 

JER: “The BOY and the OCEAN” by author Max Lucado and illustrator T. Lively Fluharty is an extended metaphor for the expansiveness of God’s love and the beauty of the Earth. 

“The ocean is like God’s love - ‘Always here.  Always deep.  It never ends.  God’s love is special.’”

What God or gods were you raised with?  What God, gods, or spirituality do you want to pass onto your kids?

I was raised with a very personal god, a “God of the Lost Keys”, one that would care enough about life and humans to help, even me, find lost objects. 

I remember getting up in front of my Mormon congregation to bear my testimony about the time I found my beloved pocket knife after a prayer in the woods. 

My belief in God has evolved over time, from believing in a stern-but-loving Heavenly Father, to perhaps a Heavenly Couple including a Heavenly Mother & Heavenly Father, to doubting the existence of any God, and to now believing “God” might be the magical reality that life exists, without any conscious direction.

Now, I find the most important thing to pass onto my children is a sense of wonder at life on Earth and openness to there being some spiritual purpose to life, but I don’t want to name it for them or teach them that they need to feel any guilt, shame, or duty to any “God”. 

I hope they become kind, generous people because they hope to find kindness and generosity from the world around them while helping to inspire it in the people they encounter.