“Healing from faith” takes a long time¹. In fact, I’d say my entire adult life thus far (getting ever closer to 40) has been UNlearning things I’d ingested in my growing-up years. Slowly letting go of shame and self-loathing about who I am and fear that God is punitive and angry. Grieving all the joy and freedom that I missed out on while stuck in cycles of pride, shame, and perfectionism.

Needless to say, I desperately want to somehow circumvent learning at least SOME of these things the hard way. 

I came across Meredith Miller on Instagram a while back and began devouring all her content. The way she talks about the Gospel is so much more attractive (and no less true!) than paradigms that start with fear. I gobbled up all her examples of how to present the Bible in age-appropriate ways AND respect the Bible for the complex book that it is, with genres and original audiences that must be explored. 

If you have kids in your life that you hope will know and love the real Jesus of the Bible (and not felt-board-Jesus, genie-Jesus, or machine-gun-Jesus (helloooo, USA)), please add this book to your wheelhouse! She lays out a helpful trust-based framework that you can build upon as kids get older. She offers lots of practical ideas and samples of how she might present stories and questions she’d ask to encourage conversation.

And now can I share a quote to show you how beautiful this book is?

“Resilience in faith circles is often misrepresented as something firm and immovable, built brick by brick, each doctrine defined, each principle provided, each application prescribed. Resilience, according to the spider, is drawn out of the ability to flex in order to withstand stress, to bend in significant ways without breaking. It is also the ability to reweave the broken strands, so as not to lose your home, and to do so without becoming too exhausted to go on. 

Woven faith is resilient faith.

Woven faith, anchored to who God is, and yet uniquely shaped, has the strength to withstand real life. When the internal strands are pliable, change and challenges don’t destroy. To be sure, the process of revisiting, questioning, and at times reimagining how those strands connect is stressful. But it’s the stress of strength. And yes, inevitably, some strands will break, beliefs we used to hold and don’t anymore. The breaking of the strand is a loss, to be sure. We grieve it, but it doesn’t need to be the end.”

Thank you, Meredith, for naming what so many of us have been weaving and re-weaving as adults, and for helping us imagine helping our kids build a woven faith from the start. 

1. I’d like to clarify, that while I’m sure there was plenty of less-than-helpful (and sometimes harmful) theology that I was taught outright, I also realize that so much of how I understood and ingested things was also due to my personality. Especially now, as a parent, it’s clear to me that kids are naturally bent in certain ways and there are SO many factors mixed together into the cocktail of how kids are formed. So while I definitely wish I’d had preachers and Sunday School teachers that were more like Meredith, I realize everyone who presented Jesus to me was doing their best, based on what they knew at the time. ↩︎