God Is... All-Knowing

By Nick (My Experience As...)

He Knows When You are Sleeping

I know, Christmas is over, but I love Christmas and could celebrate all year.  Plus, what better example for the all knowing God to a kid.

I have 4 children age 2-7.  They are girl, boy, girl, boy.  You could plan things better if you tried. My kids are all over the place with Santa, but they love presents … mostly.  The youngest is down with a present or two, but then basically wants to play and gets mad that we keep trying to get him to open the new presents.  The oldest two pretty much just tear into it. We make them take turns but you can tell it really kills them waiting. The youngest girl takes her time, looks at each thing and then opens the next present on her turn.

So back to the Santa deal.  We don’t really teach Santa in our house, but we don’t narc on the myth either.  We talk about St. Nicholas, a real hero of mine, and we talk about Jesus. They get plenty about Santa in school and since starting public school the oldest two have waffled back and forth on the Santa issue.  I think they are hedging their bets. Our oldest, a girl, was pretty firm this year and her 10 month younger brother was persuaded by her insistence a lot of the time. M, the youngest girl, is dead set that Santa is not real.  Odd that a 4 year old is so absolute in this.  She gets into screaming arguments that he isn’t real. I’m worried for kindergarten next year. I have a feeling she is going to really upset some kids.

We talked about the Santa myths this year, the fact that he knows all the names of every boy and girl, that he knows if they were bad or good and even if they are asleep or awake. Then we talked about God.  My little girl that refuses to believe in Santa also refuses to NOT believe in God. She has no problem understanding that God knows everything.

Of course that is such a huge thing to consider.  It’s funny though. The more I know the harder it is for me to wrap my head around all that God knows. With young children I don’t think this is a difficult concept.  Maybe the world is still so small that it makes sense that someone could know everything. For that matter they seem to think I know everything.

The real trick is keeping that simple faith as you grow. This is one of the many reasons Jesus tells us that if we are going to get into Heaven we will need to have the faith of a little child.

In many ways, talking to our children about God turns from us teaching to us learning. I think this is one great example. Where I might struggle with grasping the magnitude of all that God knows, my children accept it as a simple fact of life.  Every fact I ever learned and didn’t learn, every name of every person that ever was and will be and every detail about them. Every flower, blade of grass, tree, creeping, crawling, slithering, swimming, flying thing upon the Earth, every atom in the Universe and where it has been since the instant of Creation and where it will be for as long as he lets it exist. He knows all that and so much more. In all my intelligence I look at this and try to come up with way to explain it, but then my children answer all questions about what God knows with “He just knows.”

Truly the faith of a child is a magnificent thing that we should strive to nurture in the lives of our children as well as our own life.

Nick is a husband and father to four children all of whom he loves dearly. He is also a youth pastor to over 50 students, a great writer and a whiz with computers. He has a fabulous blog where he shares his Experience as a Husband, Father, Youth Pastor, Geek and Jesus Freak. Be sure to go check it out.