We’re going to make different choices than the people around us, even if it draws scrutiny. We’re going to make different choices about the way we spend our money – with entertainment. I think we should be delightful people and fully orbed in our thinking, but we’re going to make different choices with our time. Q: Are you suggesting Christian children should be socially awkward?Ī: Actually, no. I believe there are implications for our parenting in that. It is a series of decisions that make you feel increasingly at odds with this world and long for the next world. We then say, “How can I help this child feel like they belong, and be a part of everything that everyone else is doing?” The Christian life is not that. When we think about our children, there is a very strong impulse for us to think about our experiences in middle school and remember feelings of wanting to fit in, and then superimpose our own fears onto our children. If you really did what Jesus says in the “Sermon on the Mount,” you would not look like many people that you know.

There’s nothing about the way that Jesus describes the Christian life that would make us think a person who follows His instructions would not stand out in a crowd.

Jen Wilkin, author and director of adult classes for The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas, shares about handling alien children.īelow is an edited transcript of the conversation.Ī: The scriptures talk about how we are to live as aliens and strangers.

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