"Daddy, I like it when you dig."

Last night we were doing our Advent calendar and we read from Matthew 2:9-11. I explained to my children that when the magi saw the king of the Jews they rejoiced with exceeding joy and then bowed down to worship the savior. This launched into a discussion on how God saving sinful people like us should be a cause for rejoicing. I showed them throughout Scripture how expressing great joy and being saved from the wrath of God are related. After our family time my youngest daughter (Claire, who just turned six) was sitting on my lap and looked up at me and said, “Daddy, I like it when you dig.” The statement took both her mother and I by surprise, so I asked a probing question, “What do you mean?” She proceeded to explain to us that she liked it when I explained the Bible to her in ways that she can understand. She went on to express that sometimes when she reads her Bible she doesn’t catch all the things that I talk about during our Bible times. This morning I went for a run, and for some reason I was rehearsing over and over in my thoughts her statement about “liking it when I dig”. I realized that our children really do want to know the deep things of God. They want to know more than what the stories of the Bible say. They want to know how the stories express the character of God. I also came to the conclusion that our children will only rise to the level we take them. If we feed them milk all their lives they would be malnourished. If we feed them only the milk of Scripture, they will become spiritually malnourished over a period of time. We are the limiting factor in the spiritual development of our children.