Faith is Not An Heirloom

for those who feel like they have to 'get it right'

My grandma was a pastor, director of the youth choir, skilled musician, and also a collector of many things. Custom bears, for instance. Her pink depression glass was passed down to me, and it’s a delight.

She introduced my parents, approaching my dad at a summer camp where he (also a youth pastor) had brought his students the same week she’d brought hers. “I have a daughter you should meet,” she told him.

My dad was a pastor for about 40 years, 32 of them in one church. He collected books, mainly, but hardly any were passed down to me (for which I’m grateful).

It is true for me, in the case of my family, to say that faith has been passed down to me. But I think we are often given the impression that faith is passed along like depression glass, custom bears, and books. As if it’s an intact Thing that is given by one generation to the next.

Adults have it. Adults pass it on to kids, hoping they’ll hold onto it.

Faith is an heirloom.

This makes it hard for an adult who is reimagining faith, who fears their doubt has cracked the glass, their questions have worn holes in the fabric, their changes have torn out the pages.

What will they pass on to their children now? Surely they must dedicate themselves to Figuring It All Out for the sake of the next generation, they must hand down something whole and perfect.

But faith is not an heirloom.

It is not some fragile thing we must fret over, lest our children not receive something valuable from us.

Faith is a spider’s web.

I’m sure at some point in your life, you’ve looked closely at a spider’s web. It’s fascinatingly intricate, seemingly so fragile, and yet, it’s a spider’s home, its source of nourishment, its protection.

A web anchors itself at many points.  Each anchor thread is upheld by tension and expects to be stretched. Meanwhile, the internal strands give it shape, texture, complexity, beauty. Anchor threads and internal threads combine to create something incredibly resilient.

What you may not have known is that spiders’ webs are considered incredibly strong, not because they rigidly withstand the elements, but because they can bend without breaking in the face of them. According to our friends at MIT, “a spider web gets its strength from silk strands working together and their ability to stretch when stressed.”

Then there’s what happens when breakage does occur. A web is designed with the expectation that strands will break, and with resources for repair. When it does, it’s not because the spider failed; the web was made for this.

In fact the spider (and you may relate to this) doesn’t have the energy to start all over again, over and over again every time one strand fails. If it needed to do so, it would actually die.

Our faith isn’t an unbreakable heirloom. It’s a web, and sometimes strands break and need to be replaced because they just aren’t true, or because they just don’t work anymore. We realize our ways of seeing God don’t match reality. Our ways of experiencing God don’t work like they used to.

Those strands break, but we have not failed.

And we don’t need to remake everything. We tend to what broke, knowing the web will actually be stronger upon repair, even if it takes a while.

Faith is not gifted like an object, passed down like an heirloom.

Like a spider’s web, it’s woven.

• Hey God, Can I Be Honest? is a no-agenda share-your-questions-and-doubts devotion for older kids and young teens.

  Each of the 18 days focuses on one attribute of God, and each day’s journal simply asks 1) how true does this feel to you? and 2) why? Available for $5 in the Kids + Resource Shop.

May God grant you the courage to release your fear of having to get faith ‘just right’ so you can pass it on to the next generation and the boldness to weave a web all your own, anchored to who God is, as uniquely textured as you are.

Amen.