135Part 3 Thriving in Faith: “Faithing”
Part 3
Thriving in Faith:
“Faithing”
Faithing: a child’s growth in owning and embodying their own journey with God as they encounter new experiences and information.
As parents and adults who care about adolescents and emerging adults, we have accrued enough parenting experience to feel like we can handle certain topics with our kids, or at least find the resources to support them.
Faith often feels more elusive.
Their questions about life, Jesus, good, and evil become more pressing and complex.
You may feel like no one trained you to be a theologian.
You and parents like you barely remember your high school or college philosophy lessons. There’s much you fear you don’t understand about God and the Bible.
And their questions, if we are honest, sometimes still haunt us.
Faithing provides grace, explanations, and conversational spaces to explore the deeper questions our growing kids are asking.
Faithing invites us to reengage our own faith journeys too.
In chapters 5 and 6, we propose that through the concept of faithing, we can encourage meaningful conversations about faith and explore renewed ways for our kids (and us) to connect with Jesus along with faith communities. Our hope is that we all continue to develop a faith that grows with us.
A prayer:
Jesus, our kids’ faith is changing and so is ours. We feel the weight of their search to make sense of our world, themselves, and God. This process also makes us more aware of our own questions and emotions, which can feel both exciting and terrifying. Grant us wisdom to listen well, patience to hold ambiguity, grace to receive their doubts, and courage to further our own faithing. Please also grant us a community who can hold all of this with us, journeying together toward you.