There comes a moment in the lives of those of us with chil­dren, where we, for a fleet­ing flesh­ly sec­ond, speak into the open air the ques­tion, “why do we have to care so much?” One of these moments had arisen in our home recent­ly when we were eval­u­at­ing the deci­sion to allow a cer­tain book to be con­sumed by our eager read­ers. It is labo­ri­ous, frankly, to have con­vic­tions; to ascer­tain what is the author’s intent, what is the mes­sage being preached, and whether or not the read­er is equipped to sift through a sec­u­lar world­view and hold it up to the can­dle of truth. When these moments come, we are tempt­ed to be envi­ous of the hoards of par­ents whose ther­mome­ter is an age-grad­ed rat­ing accep­tance. Wouldn’t it be eas­i­er if we didn’t care so much? Wouldn’t it be so nice to sit and enjoy a movie with­out spend­ing the length of the end-cred­its dis­sect­ing it’s value?

The short and long answer to this temp­ta­tion is, of course, a hard no. The cost of apa­thy is far to high, and the account­abil­i­ty that we have as par­ents is, of course, huge. I recent­ly read an arti­cle admon­ish­ing its read­ers to give full mean­ing to the phrase “Christ-cen­tered”. Much like the words “love” or “awe­some”, whose mean­ings have been sand­ed down to be broad and catholic, “Christ-cen­tered”, although, gen­er­al­ly good, tends to lack it’s exten­sive prop­er­ties. Our school in gen­er­al can be Christ-cen­tered, but is our forty-five min­utes of phon­ics Christ-cen­tered? Or the thir­ty min­utes of recess? Are our chil­dren point­ed to Christ when they dis­cov­er what a star is made of? Do we approach each and every encounter with our stu­dents and fam­i­lies hold­ing fast to the only rock that is the sure­ty of our not drowning?

If we are search­ing for the easy way out, the path of least resis­tance, and the total aban­don in recre­ation, then we can be sure that, although easy now, these tablets that we fail to hang up on our door­posts will crash down upon our heads when our chil­dren are old­er. We miss out on so much when we expect lit­tle from our chil­dren. They are big eaters, so let’s give them hearty food.