Directions

Bedtime theology with the 3 yo…  

(While snuggling at night)

Me: We should make communion bread sometime! You know, like we have at church.

3 yo: Yeah but we have to follow directions.

Me: That’s right! You do follow directions when you’re baking.

3 yo: But it’s not the car directions. Not the car ones.

Me: Good point, sweetie! You’re right.

3 yo: Yeah, it’s the inside directions.

Preschool children can be sticklers for doing things the "right way" which can include everything from this insistence on following the directions for baking communion bread to commanding that a grilled cheese sandwich be served whole because that's the way we always do it (I cut his in half today = total meltdown). I get it. I'm a first-born rule-follower, raised to follow directions, which has both served me in life and also at times been a disadvantage. It can be good to follow directions, but there are also times for U-turns and following your own instincts and wisdom. 

My father has rarely met a backroad he didn't like; he never follows directions for the shortest way from any point A to point B. Backroads offer a chance to see how other farmers' crops are doing or to look for tractors or other farm implements for sale in someone's yard. You can't see that on the interstate. Sometimes making your own path leads to new opportunities.

The danger with skipping directions, of course, is that you can also find yourself stuck somewhere you don't want to be. Many years ago on a trip to the Taize monastery in France, I attended a Bible study with a young monk. I don't remember the Scripture passage for the day, but I remember his imagery about following directions. He told us that God isn't screaming at us for the detours and even wrong turns we take in life, God's not an angry, judgmental GPS. Rather, God is a gentle voice from a navigation system that says, "Recalculating, how about trying a different way?" As a young person in my twenties, still struggling with my life's direction, I found that incredibly comforting. How many times in life have we thought "I have just royally messed that up."? But God can always make a way through. 

So many of the best cooks improvise, never following directions, but go on taste and smell and intuition and I wonder if there is a lesson here for the life of faith. Yes, we get some "directions" from Scripture and commandments and tradition. But there isn't one right way to follow Christ. The answer is in the living, the way is made by walking. 

We're about ready to resume Sunday school at the church where my family worships, and I'm ready for it. I even volunteered to teach this year, on Sundays when I'm not working elsewhere. I love sending my children to Sunday school (I'm not teaching any of them) because they get some different directions for the life of faith than they get at home, and they get to practice it with their peers. I'm reminded that while I may be my kids' first teacher of faith - the first to give directions - I'm not the only one.