I wrote last month making the statement, “Hope is culture.” What we expect we live. I believe this, and I have been reflecting a lot personally about my own family culture. We have articulated ten virtues which we want to govern our lives, and create our culture as a family. We are on the journey of making this true, and over the next ten months I want to take the intentional journey myself to review those cultures, to reflect upon steps we’ve taken to implement them, and to dream about what can, and could, and will be. As a father I don’t want to just cut ten words out of wood, hang them on my wall, and pretend I have a culture. It is a start, but experience is always the truest revelation. When we say we have a culture of peace does this experientially look like the eradication of anxiety? When we say we have a culture of honor are there still times I talk about people behind their back? These are the kinds of questions I know I need to be asking. And so this month I turn my attention to a culture of Presence.
We have said we want the Presence of the Living God, the Christ who is Jesus, to be the starting, moving, and finishing point of everything we do. In other words, if He’s not in it, we don’t want to be. More than this, we want to experience this God as living. We don’t want to talk about a God to our kids who in experience is no more real than Santa Clause. We want the more, and we want the hunger for the more to drive everything else we do as a family.
I love the moment in the Gospel of John when Jesus starts telling his group of hundreds of followers about the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. I love watching them all leave except for twelve, and Jesus turning to those twelve and saying, “Why are you still here?” And I especially love Peter’s response, “Where else would we go? Your words are life!” Above all, I want such a response to be the resonance of the Wiens family, and I want the Carpenter Christ’s rough fingerprints to be felt and seen all over the masterpiece we are becoming.
But how are we doing? And how are we doing it? As I ask myself these questions I think about weekly worship and singing times as a family. I think about singing and speaking prayers for God’s Presence with us. But my mind finds rest in the place of Eli’s reporting his conversation with Jesus about the brother who mommy had in her tummy, who we didn’t know was in her tummy. And the place where Ellie screams out, “Jesus healed me, Jesus!” And the place where Hope prays, “Thank you God. We bless you. We comfort you. We tuck you in.” And all of these things bring me back to the same conviction I start with. It can’t be instituted. There is no formula. There is only relating.
And there is only the shockingly terrifying revelation that they are being introduced to the God I as a parent interact with.
Because let’s be real, none of us interacts with all of God. None of us knows Him fully. He is manifold in nature. And yet, we can know Him more. He promises his willingness to make Himself known, and as Jesus he stubbornly refuses to be anything else. And my kids see my life, my interaction with God, and they know how real He is to me. They know where I trust him and where I don’t, and where I live hypocrisy and where I don’t, and they know it instinctively. They may not be able to articulate it, but they are absorbing it all.
And with that being said, I find myself back on my knees, back to a hunger for more, even as I am more full of Him than ever. All the repeat-after-me prayer techniques, all the silly chants, and games, and frustrating lessons of how-to and how-not-to help my kids grow up with God, all of it is secondary to the insatiable desire which is producing them. I have the desire. He is good and faithful who will provide. And thus, in the final place where I offer pointers for how to create a culture of the Presence I choose silence. Activities have helped my family, and I want to develop and enjoy more of them, but it is the hunger which is foremost. Is my ever-increasing awareness of His faithfulness making me ever-more faithful in the building of this family? Answer that question in the affirmative every day and I believe the rest will come. I am striving with you to do so.
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