Jesus Loves Me: Simple Truths That Sustain a Mama’s Heart
I read my daughter a Bible story, say our typical prayers, and the familiar tune rolls out almost involuntarily: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Wrapped neatly in this child’s rhyme is big theology for my grown-up heart too. It’s a bold declaration of the character of God and of our doctrine of Scripture. Yet, too often, I rush the song, I speed-read the story, and I don’t consider the depth of the theology coming out of my mouth. Too often, I assume I must “outgrow” such a childlike theology in pursuit of the deep things of God. But these essentials of the faith are for my daughter and me—and they carry us through the deepest waves and darkest trials we will experience.
For Now and For Later
The simple (but huge) truths we teach our children now will continue to sustain them as they grow. They will build on what we teach them about God, but the core truths that we read about and sing about will never become obsolete for their lives.
God made you.
God saved you.
God is with you.
God is good to you.
These same truths can sustain them when they are afraid of going to school or afraid of failing at their job. They can comfort our children when they experience the loss of a beloved toy or a beloved friend. They can guide them as they learn about who they are as toddlers and teens and thirty-somethings.
When we teach our children truths about God, we are equipping them to face life now and life when they are our age. So let’s sing the songs and read the stories, knowing that what we say here matters for the long haul.
For Us
Much of what we do as mothers is laying foundations. We teach our kids their ABCs so they might one day learn to read. We teach our kids their 123s so they might one day learn algebra. We teach our children about God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit so they might one day understand the Trinity.
But if we reduce the truths we teach our children to just a “foundation,” we miss the full beauty of those truths and the power they have to sustain even us as adults. What we teach our children is for our hearts too.
The Bible stories we read to our children about God promising to send a deliverer to save his people from their sins are for us. The songs we sing about knowing and loving God are for us. The hug we give a scared child with the whispered promise that “God is with us”—that’s for us.
When we dedicate our motherhood to speaking the truth about God to our children—in the car, by the bedside, around the table—it’s not wasted. It’s not wasted on our children, and it’s certainly not wasted on us.
For Our Hardest Days
While on vacation with our two-year-old daughter, my young, healthy husband suddenly had a stroke. A 911 call and an ambulance to the hospital started a month-long investigation into what was going wrong in his body. That first night in the hospital, my heart hurt so badly, I could not form words to pray. The words of a children’s book came to mind: “The Spirit will know exactly what you need, and he will pray for you.”[1]
When I laid in bed, waiting to hear what kind of cancer my husband had, a children’s song came to mind: “Come to me, all of you, who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”[2]
As I drove to the cancer hospital where my husband would receive specialized care for his acute myeloid leukemia and myeloid sarcoma, I struggled to love God. The question we ask our daughter every day came to mind: “Why do we love God? Because he made us, and he saved us.”
When the medical complexities and complications continued to darken and alter the plans we had for our future, the verse I had been memorizing with our daughter came to mind: “The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9).
And as I laid beside my husband in the ICU—leukemia having raged throughout his chest, causing stroke after stroke after stroke—I told him, “Go be with the Lord. We will be okay because he is with us.”
God made me.
God saved me.
God is with me.
God is good to me.
And, Oh Lord, help me believe it.
Where did my heart go in the darkest nights? To the Lord—to the theology basics I tell my daughter every day. All my brain could handle was rehearsing those simple truths over and over again.
If what we meditate, sing, and read on the daily is what sticks in our minds—not just our children’s—let’s be deliberate to take advantage of every moment to rehearse truth about who God is, what he says, and what he does. Let us grow in—but not outgrow—our knowledge of our deep and wonderful God.
[1] Wifler, Laura. Any Time, Any Place, Any Prayer: We Can Talk with God. Epsom: The Good Book Company, 2022.
[2] Slugs & Bugs. Come to Me (Matthew 11:28-30). Sing the Bible, Vol. 4. Brentwood Studies, 2021.
