I took my daughter out for a special daddy-daughter night. She picked a favorite spot to get special treats. She got a cup of edible cookie dough and I got a big chocolate chip cookie. Then we sat together to enjoy our treats and talk.
We talked about her friends at school, her class's activities for Valentine's Day, the nearby houses that still had Christmas lights in their yard, and how yummy our treats were. Then I thought I'd ask a totally open ended question and see what she said. I asked, "What would you like to talk about?"
I recently shared (What Did You Do Today?) how at dinner each night we ask our kids what they did that day. My daughter must know the routine because when I asked what she wanted to talk about, she asked me, "What did you do at work today?" I quickly considered how to tell a young child about my day at work as an engineer in a way that would be interesting to her. We had been working on goal setting for the year so I decided to tell her a little about that.
"Today we worked on making some goals, " I told her. "Do you know what a goal is?" She told me that she didn't know. So I explained that a goal is when we think of something that we really want to do or to learn or a way we want to make ourselves better. Then we plan to work real hard to do it or learn it. If we keep making and completing goals, then we become better people. "But we'll never be better than God!" she exclaimed.
Wow, that wasn't the response I expected. I had just listened to an episode of the Domestic Church Project's podcast that had reminded me to look for opportunities to have simple, spontaneous conversations about our faith. With this fresh in my mind, I decided to jump on the chance to keep this conversation going.
"That's right," I told her, "we'll never be better than God, but we can keep trying to be more like God." Finding ways to be more like God can make great goals. Even though we'll never be better than God, we can always find ways to be more God-like. Next I asked her, "What do you think God is like?" We are made in the image of God, so I was confident that whichever aspect of God with which she responded, there would be a way for her to grow more like God in that respect. She thought for a moment and answered, "God is a Creator, He makes people."
"That's right," I said again. Then I explained that we can be like God because we can be creative too. We can't make people, but I asked her about some art projects that she did at school. I told her that we can create artwork and be creative because God is creative, and we were made to be like God.
It was a quick, simple, unplanned, spontaneous conversation. As that podcast had recently reminded me, conversations like this should be common in our domestic churches. I'm making a goal for myself to keep looking for opportunities like this to have simple conversations with my family about my faith.
I hope our conversation made my daughter think a little about her faith. She also helped me to think about my faith. After a day of corporate goal planning, I hadn't really thought of goals in this way, but what better goal can we make for ourselves than to be more like God? Many of us recently made New Year's resolutions in the last several weeks or will be thinking about Lenten resolutions in the next couple weeks. As we do this personal goal setting, we might consider a goal to be more like God in some way. We will never be better than God, but we were created in the image of God and we can always find ways to more like God.
