For the Parent Who Has Nothing to Give

This may be the most important chapter in the book for the largest number of readers.

The formation this book describes assumes a parent who has something to form the child with—a living faith, an actual knowledge of God, a household oriented around the worship of the Father and the Son. Many parents do not have this. They were not formed in it. No one gave it to them. They may want something better for their children than what they received, but when it comes to actually passing on the knowing that Jesus defines as eternal life, they have nothing in their hands.

There is no technique that substitutes for the formation. But there is one truth available to the parent in this position that overrides the shortage: the vine is accessible to you before it reaches your children. Deuteronomy 6 does not address the children first. It addresses the adults. The forming words must be in your own heart and mind before you can speak them to your children with the weight of someone who has actually lived in them.

The vine, as this book has used the term, means present-tense knowing of God—not knowing about God the way you might know about a public figure, but the kind of knowing that changes how you live on an ordinary Tuesday because you are actually in contact with Someone who is actually there. That kind of knowing is not inherited or achieved. It is received. And it is available to you in this hour, in the present tense of your actual life, with whatever confusion and distance and unresolved questions you are carrying.

"Now this is eternal life – that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent." — John 17:3 (NET)

The word "now" is not accidental. Not "then, when you have cleaned up enough." Not "after sufficient preparation." Now. The vine does not require a fully formed faith to take hold of. It requires the branch. The branch, in this case, is you.

The parent who arrives at the vine in the middle of their children's formation years is not too late. They are offering something different from what they would have offered if they had started earlier—not a stable, long-formed household faith but a living demonstration of what it looks like to find the vine from the middle of a life that did not have it. For some children, watching a parent genuinely encounter the knowing that is eternal life will be more compelling than being born into a household where it was always ambient.

Start where you are. The present is the only place the vine is available. The formation that matters most is the one that begins today.

What that looks like on a Tuesday is smaller than you think. It is a prayer said out loud in the car before dropping the child at school—twenty seconds, imperfect, but spoken in the child's hearing to Someone you are actually addressing. It is John 17:3 opened on your phone before you get out of the car yourself, sitting with the words for a moment before the day starts. It is one sentence at dinner that names God as present in the ordinary thing being discussed, not as a Sunday category but as the Person in the room. None of this requires preparation. It requires only the decision to begin.