Most of us were handed it as good news.
The God who is always watching got presented roughly the way a salesman presents a security system. Nothing gets past. Nothing goes unseen. You are never alone in the dark.
Then the lights went off and you were alone in the dark, and a five year old had to work out what all that watching was actually for.
Nobody ever told us what the watching was for. That is the whole problem with this one, and it is worth naming before anything else, because a child cannot leave a question like that open. She will fill it in. What she fills it in with tends to depend on what the adults around her seem to want from her.
What a Child Actually Hears in the God Who Is Always Watching
Think about who watches a small child.
Parents watch. Teachers watch. The person at the front of the classroom watches. A good deal of the watching a child has actually experienced is somebody checking, and checking often arrives shortly before consequences do. That is not a cynical reading of childhood. It is some of the evidence a six year old has on hand.
So when an adult leans over the bed and says that God sees everything, there is an arithmetic close at hand. Something is watching. Watching is for catching. Therefore something is waiting to catch me. Not every child runs it. Enough of them do that I hear about it constantly, usually from the adults they turned into.
The adult saying it usually means comfort. Many of them mean it sincerely, and some of them were handed the same sentence and are passing along the only version they got. The child receives a camera. The two of you can be in the same room having entirely different conversations, and neither one of you will find out for about twenty-five years.
The god that gets built out of that is a specific character and worth naming plainly. This one never blinks and never goes off duty, and no purpose for the watching is ever stated out loud. So the purpose gets supplied by the child, and a frightened child will often supply a bad one.
For a lot of us the supplied purpose had a name and a temperature. That gets its own week later on, at Week 36, and it is the single most common thing parents write to me about.
The Same Verse Can Comfort an Adult and Frighten a Child
The material is real and it is old. Psalm 139 works through the impossibility of getting away from God, out to the sea, down to the grave, into the dark. Proverbs 15:3 says the eyes of God are everywhere, watching the bad and the good. Hebrews 4:13 says nothing in creation is hidden.
Psalm 139 is a complicated piece of writing. It carries wonder, self-examination, the sense of being thoroughly known, and near the end a burst of real hostility toward enemies. Read the middle of it as an adult and it can sound like somebody working out that there is nowhere they are unaccompanied, and finding they are glad about it. Read the same lines to a nine year old who has just lied about her homework and it lands as a different document.
The text did not change. The reader did, and so did the reason the verse was being brought out.
My reading of it, and I will own this as mine, is that these passages sit closer to being known than to being monitored. Being known is what people want from the people they love. Being monitored is what happens to employees.
That is a hard distinction for a young child to make. She may not have a category yet for being fully known by someone with no interest in using it, since most of the adults who know her that well are also the ones who set her bedtime.
Why the Prayer Had to Be Said Again
Plenty of us prayed the prayer more than once.
For those raised evangelical, that usually means the salvation prayer. Asking Jesus into your heart, at a camp or a kitchen table or in the row after a sermon. Other traditions have their own version of a moment that is supposed to settle the question once and for all. What follows is about what happens when the moment does not settle it.
Asked again at nine, again at eleven, again at a retreat when the music was going. Not because anybody doubted the arithmetic. Because you could not verify it, and the god who was watching gave no signal either way, and the only thing available was to do it again and hope it stuck.
It works about like checking a lock you have already checked. The relief is real and it is short, and then you are standing at the door again.
More than one person has told me, usually while apologizing for it, that they still say some version of it. Not deliberately. It shows up when a plane pushes back from the gate, or when the phone rings at two in the morning, and it finishes itself before they have decided anything about it. They tend to laugh when they say this. It is not really a funny thing to have discovered about yourself at forty.
What to Tell a Kid Who Has Already Heard It
Your child will run into this. From a relative, from a friend at school, from a song at a birthday party. The sentence travels well because it is short and it sounds kind.
Ages 3 to 6. Go after the purpose rather than the fact, because the purpose is the part doing the damage, and the purpose is the part you can actually speak to. I am never going to use God to get you to behave. Nobody in this house is keeping a list on you. You do not have to be good for anyone to love you, including me. Say the last one often enough that it gets boring.
Ages 7 to 12. This age can hold two readings of one sentence, and giving them both is the actual gift. Some people hear God sees everything and feel watched. Some people hear it and feel accompanied. It is the same words, and which one you get depends a lot on who is saying it to you and why.
Ages 13 and up. Give them the moving parts. There is the text. There is what a person takes the text to mean. There is what they then do with it. And there is what it does to whoever is on the receiving end, which can be different from all three. Someone can mean comfort and produce fear. A teenager can hold that, and being able to pull those four apart is one of the more durable tools you can hand anybody.
What none of these require is that you have settled what you think God is. Week 11 takes the direct question, whether God is real, and the answers there are built for a parent who does not know.
Your Own Repair Is Not a Prerequisite
Last week we looked at the blank that arrives when your kid asks you something about God. When parents trace that blank back, this is very often the character sitting at the bottom of it.
Some of this may stay with you. You might still catch yourself running a private thought past something and then feeling faintly ridiculous about it, or you might find it fades out entirely. Waiting until you are finished before you parent differently would mean waiting a long time, and the waiting is not required.
What matters here is narrower, which is whether the same character shows up in the next person. It gets handed along if nobody interrupts, because the sentence is short, it sounds loving, and somebody who means well is going to say it to your child.
The interruption is not a lecture. It is mostly the boring repeated business of telling a child that she is loved when she has done nothing to earn it, on ordinary days, when nothing is at stake and there is no lesson attached. That is slower than a doctrine and it does not fit on a plaque.
Next week we go to the nursery wall, and to the fact that the most popular decorating theme in Christian childhood is a story in which almost everybody drowns.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and raising children who never have to be afraid of God.
If you are raising kids after leaving the faith you grew up in, and you want a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and nobody has to pretend to have it all figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All