Closing

The child at the kitchen table is being formed right now.

Not in a crisis moment. In the ordinary hour before school, eating cereal, looking at a phone, absorbing the ambient condition of the household they were given. The formation that shapes the deepest grammar of identity is running in this hour, as it has been since they were old enough to absorb anything.

The culture has placed a formation agenda in that ordinary hour. It announces itself as inclusion, affirmation, acceptance, love. Some of what it carries is genuinely those things. Some of what it carries is the grammar of desire-as-identity and feeling-as-moral-authority, installed before the child has the developmental capacity to hold it critically.

The parent who has read this far has been given a choice that is not about politics. It is about formation. Whether to occupy the ground that belongs to the family—the kitchen table, the car ride, the lying-down and the rising-up—with the knowing that Jesus defines as eternal life. Or to leave that ground empty.

There is no neutral option. The ground will be occupied. The question is who occupies it.

What the occupied ground produces, over years, is not a child who has avoided the questions. It is a child who arrives at the questions already rooted. Already knowing that what they feel is not the final word on who they are. Already holding a grammar that names the vine before the culture names the counterfeit. When the sentence eventually needs to be said, the parent who has been present in the ordinary hours has the standing to say it. And when it is said, and the Spirit takes it from there, the relationship is strong enough to hold.

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

That knowing is available to the parent reading this in this hour. It is available to the child at the kitchen table in the next hour.

"And the world is passing away with all its desires, but the person who does the will of God remains forever." — 1 John 2:17 (NET)

That is the last word. Begin there.

Soli Deo Gloria

The Michlaude Discipleship Project