Selective Hearing

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” – Proverbs 3:5

Yesterday, Ash Wednesday marked the beginning of the Lenten season of forty days leading to Easter. My daughters attended a church service with me last night while my husband played in the praise band.

The service was advertised as a “family” service, which to me meant it would be geared toward kids with a message the younger crowd could appreciate. Imagine my surprise when the sermon was about David’s adulterous encounter with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband. I never would have guessed that church would be where my children learned the word “affair.” I also didn’t think it would be the place where they would find out babies don’t always come after marriage, the way I have implied. When we got to the car, I asked my kids what they thought about the service. Thankfully, they both agreed that they didn’t understand a lot of it because “the guy talking used too many big words.” Whew, maybe we dodged a couple of bullets there.

However, despite her lack of understanding some vocabulary, the Lord still used that service to work a transformation in my eight-year-old’s heart. The whole way home she happily chattered on about how she had gotten out of the habit of reading the Bible every day and wanted to resume the discipline. She asked if we could read from the Bible before dinner each night during Lent, and if she could start getting up earlier in the morning to have time to pray or work through her devotional guide. She asked if it was okay to pray at school. She also expressed her sadness for a girl who doesn’t know Jesus, and said she wanted to tell her friend about Him at recess. Clearly, while I was worrying about what was said in the service, God was speaking to her in an entirely different way.

I love that about God. I find it fascinating that He can lead two people in the same worship service to hear two entirely different things. My oldest daughter left the service on fire, I left trying to figure out how I would explain some of the speaker’s more colorful descriptions of David’s behavior, and my youngest left wondering how long it would be before she could get home and into bed. She also wanted to know why everyone had ashes on their foreheads. The same experience left us in different emotional states and fueled unique responses in how to move forward in faith.

This experience has me feeling a bit more confident in sending my daughter out into the world at large. While I believe it is important to let kids enjoy the innocence of youth and to shield young children from some of the harsher realities of life, I can now see that I am not alone in this effort. God is obviously at work in filling her ears with what He has to say, protecting her from things she doesn’t need to hear. That doesn’t mean she is oblivious to the four-letter words that float around the third grade, or the way her peers all giggle at the word “sex,” but I trust that God can temper her understanding of these things until she is developmentally ready for them.

Have you ever had an experience where someone at church gave your child more information than you hoped? What was the result of this?