You remember how every bedtime I’d read you a Jesus story from the gospels? And how there was a time you’d say “daddy, tell me a Jesus story”? This might be my sweetest memory from your childhood.

It was a strategy. I had designs to design your soul. I knew that passing my “religion” on to you, though not something I opposed, would be a futile effort in the long run, unless. I knew that all your experiences in our life at church, though important, would fall off you like water once you got out of your parent’s house into the corrosive world. Unless. I knew that teaching you about Christian faith, though important, would never be enough. Unless. I even know that your authentic commitment to Christ and subsequent baptism would never hold, unless, unless, unless.

Unless you fell in love. Unless you were charmed by the personality of Jesus you would never hold to Him. It’s in the affections, not just the beliefs, where fidelity roots. So I explicitly and intentionally tried to root the stories of Jesus’ acts and words in the deepest layer of your affections, so that all the stories you would later fall in love with, whether read or watched or imagined, and including those you would in the flesh live, both comedies and tragedies — all the stories we take in are overlaid on Master Stories, which touch our affections early, and color our senses. I tried to form your soul’s Master Story layer in the shape of Jesus Stories.

The whole New Testament is important. Don’t spend much time on all the doctrinal arguments that occupy the churches – it’s long been settled that what we call the New Testament is the best record of the first generation of Christians, that we’re not going to get behind it. And the big event that caused all the rest, the Plop of a stone into the pond of human history, is the life recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Then the letters of the apostles, ripples from that splash, tell us more about what the Plop means. There will always be little distracting controversies: how does this story in Luke compare to that one in Mark? Is this number an error? And so on. But here’s the crux: the book we have is what God intended. And Jesus, His stories, are the start and the heart.

So I intended to brainwash you into a permanent state of charmed by Jesus, and I enjoin you to do the same to your children. There’s no such thing as a mind that is a blank slate. Nobody ever dropped out of a womb and started thinking for himself. We all get mentally drenched in the stories of our culture from our first cry to our last breath. Do not leave your children at the mercy of the random and malicious nightmare of bad stories of their culture and then tell yourself you let them be themselves. There are a thousand bearers of vicious stories who have no interest in allowing your children to “be themselves”. Fight.

Well, that’s quite a rant, but I mean to call you back to the well from which you first drank. Your father’s first forced dose is not enough. If you forget that you’re actually supposed to be in thrall to a hypnotic personality, please go back and back again to your first love. Read the gospels, incessantly, daily, until you feel again how charming Jesus is. He loves you and He pulled you toward Himself through me, when you were wrapped in footie pajamas. Go back, go back, go back, and take your children with you.