Why is apologetics or giving reasons for your faith important for this generation and for parents? How does having a conversation with your kids at an early age affect the task of parenting and how students approach these topics of apologetics and worldview? What does it practically look like to begin teaching your kids the Bible and having these kinds of conversations even at young ages? Why does Biblical hope matter as we approach a post-Christian culture?
Get answers to these questions and more in this episode of the podcast, as we learn what it looks like to talk to our kids about God. Hear from Natasha Crain, author of Talking With Your Kids About God, about these issues and more!
Learn More about our Guest:
Natasha Crain
Natasha Crain is the author of the new book Talking With Your Kids About God. She has also written Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side: 40 Conversations to Help Them Build a Lasting Faith and also the popular blog Christian Mom Thoughts. Crain has an MBA in Marketing and Statistics from UCLA and a certificate in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. She is a mom to three kids and a wife to her husband of 17 years.
Go Deeper:
Pick up Natasha Crain’s book today!
Figure out how to navigate your teens through having a healthy balance in today’s tech world!
Learn how a Gap Year can position your teen for success in college.
Check out why so many parents are choosing Impact 360 for their students!
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to the Impact 360 Institute Podcast where our goal is to explore Biblical worldview and servant leadership to equip you for everyday influence. Here’s your host, author and Director of Cultural Engagement, Jonathan Morrow.
Jonathan Morrow: Well, welcome to the Impact 360 Institute podcast, how do you talk to your kids about God? Well, that’s the topic that we’re going to be talking about today with Natasha Crain and she is a popular blogger, author and speaker who is passionate about equipping Christian parents to raise their kids with an understanding of how to make a case for and defend their faith in an increasingly secular world. Her blog, Christian Mom Thoughts, attracts more than 25,000 readers each month and she’s the author of “Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side.” And Natasha has an MBA in marketing and statistics from UCLA and a certificate in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. Uh, she’s a former marketing executive and adjunct professor and lives in Southern California with her husband and three children. So, Natasha, welcome to the podcast.
Natasha Crain: Hey, thanks so much. It’s great to be on with you.
Jonathan Morrow: Yeah. So let’s just start off right off the bat, why did you write this book? Why did you write, “Talking To Your Kids About God”?
Natasha Crain: Yeah, well I-I came out with “Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side” similarly titled book in March of 2016 and it was kind of the, the first apologized book to write directly to parents and give an overview of all forty different subjects that are really important for parents to understand today and discuss with their kids. It covered all the major subject areas of God and Jesus, truth and worldviews, the Bible and science. And, after parents were reading that book they said, well, you know, they got interested and said, “This is really important and I want to learn more so what do I read next?” And of course, there are lots and lots of amazing apologetics books that are out there, but they were kind of asking for more in that same style as the first book. And so, that’s how the idea for this book came to be. It’s really kind of a follow up to “Keep Your Kids On God’s Side” that starts a new series now that goes in depth on the individual subjects so, “Talking to Your Kids About God,” that just came out is 30 conversations specifically about God, the existence of God and science and God, the nature of God, believing in God and the difference God makes. The next book in the series will be talking about with your kids about Jesus and potentially after that talking to your kids about the Bible. So, now it’s just kind of digging deeper into those subjects. So, I was excited to write this book because there were, there were so many people saying, “I really want to learn more now, so what do I do next?” And this was kind of the answer to that.
Jonathan Morrow: That’s great. Well, just as you know, we’re kindred spirits in this, we have a heart for the next generation and I’m so glad you’ve written this book, such a helpful resource for parents to definitely check out. But, let’s set the, kind of the larger, you know, step back for just a second, why is apologetics or giving reasons for your faith, why is that important from your perspective for this generation and for parents?
Natasha Crain: Well, it’s, as you know, it’s critically important because kids today are going to be challenged from the youngest age in their faith and it-it’s literally everywhere around them, what they see in small snippets on TV, that whatever, you know, they’re allowed to see with, with their parents, it’s in commercials, it’s on magazine covers in the grocery aisle, if they’re old enough to be using the internet it’s literally everywhere online and in social media, I mean you can’t escape it. And so, the solution for parents is not to hide from it and say , “Wow, this world is so crazy! I’m going to take my kids, I’m going to hide them away and then I’ll send them out into the world like that when they’re 18.” The solution instead is that we need to be the ones to talk to them about those challenges first and, you know, the-that’s the truth with so many other things but yet a lot of parents haven’t kind of embraced that same mentality with faith. And so, that’s really where my passion lies, is helping parents to understand what are the specific challenges today? Because you can’t address them if you don’t know what they are. And then, once you know what those challenges are, how do you actually talk about them effectively with your kids? It’s not a matter of, ‘if’ it really is just a matter of ‘when’ they start encountering these things.
Jonathan Morrow: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. You know, one of the things is we see our students come through Impact 360 and our different experiences. It’s always so helpful that they have these conversation earlier because, you know, I’m interacting with them around when they’re teenagers in their high school years and college years and our gap year but it’s so important that parents frame and set these questions up a lot sooner because as you mentioned, kids are getting hit with all sorts of information in our kind of information overload society. So, this is, this is a critical conversation. One of the things I love in your book, early on you kind of have a conversation and you make some distinctions around kind of discipline and direction and some different ways to kind of play that out and different options. Can you say a little bit about that and how that would affect kind of how parents approach kind of even, even their task of parenting but even more just kind of these topics of apologetics and worldview?
Natasha Crain: Right. So, discipline and direction are kind of the two ingredients that we need as parents in order to effectively disciple our kids. A-and they’re kind of independent things. And, some people have one or the other but not both or sometimes we don’t have either. But just briefly, discipline is just that you’re consistently doing these things, like you’re consistently working on your kids’ discipleship and it’s so hard as busy parents, I mean, we, you know, many of us have kids that are involved a lot of things. My kids are in baseball and soccer and softball and take piano lessons, all these things and sometimes it piles up and we just put on the backburner that kind of active discipleship in the home and that is really a shame because ultimately our highest priority needs to be on equipping our kids to know and love Jesus. So, the discipline part of it is really just that day to day consistent approach to and planning for having your kids talk about and understand and study God’s Word. And, the direction part of it is you actually know what you’re doing when you do that. So, in other words, we can be really disciplined and we can say, “Well, I’m going to do something every day,” and we can be doing things that are maybe marginally helpful but not necessarily the things that our kids need. And by and large when I talk to parents today this is missing in a lot of cases because parents do whatever feels comfortable to them, they do what’s familiar, maybe they just kind of repeat how they were raised; they take their kids to church on Sunday, say, you know, a prayer at mealtime or at bedtime and they’re not really sure what else to do. So that’s the direction part, it’s understanding what they need to be doing, given the world that their kids are growing up in. So ultimately we want to have both discipline and direction because those two things work together to really disciple our kids.
Jonathan Morrow: That’s great. And as you mentioned you know, you’re a mom, you’re with the kids and, you’ve got three right? Three kids?
Natasha Crain: Right. We have two eight year olds and a seven year old.
Jonathan Morrow: There you go. So, so far, you know, what’s the toughest question that you’ve been asked by your kids?
Natasha Crain: Huh. Oh boy, the toughest question. Well, there are all kinds, we, we actually do what we call “Questions night” regularly where we just, we take the time that we would normally be doing a Bible study with our kids and we say, “Tonight we’re just going to take whatever questions that you have about God or Jesus, anything.” And, you know, our kids come up with a million questions so I’m trying to think of what some of the, the harder questions are. I-I’d have to say it’s the ones the Bible doesn’t actually answer. So they, you know, a lot of questions about heaven. I think that kids, you know, naturally have a lot of curiosity about what that is and, you know, I, of course as a parent you want to give them answers and you want to give them good answers but at the same time oftentimes kids ask things that we don’t have the full answers to. They’re really good at making you feel kind of dumb sometimes right and say, “You know, I don’t…” Exactly. There is a difference between not knowing an answer when an answer does exist and not knowing an answer because God hasn’t told us. And so, we, we tend to get a lot of those and especially I think my daughter, she really struggles with the whole concept of well, how can God be eternal? You know, how is that even possible that there could be something that’s just always existed and as I explain to her, that’s something that a lot of adults struggle to understand too in that as the humans who live in this, you know, finite space and time, we can’t always comprehend these things outside of the concept of it. So, those are, those are really tough questions I think to answer a lot of times with kids because sometimes as adults we can’t even conceptualize it but we have to help our kids somehow understand it.
Jonathan Morrow: Yeah, for sure. I appreciate that, you know, just trying to, “How do I this concrete?” I mean, you, “Okay, what is eternity, what is time, what is God?” I mean all these big questions, right? So, I love, I love that you tackle these questions in your book, “Talking With Your Kids About God” just such a great resource on this. So, so imagine some parents out there, I mean, now I’m a father of three, I mean it’s crazy, you know with schedules and everything else. So, share just maybe a couple practical tips about what’s kind of worked in your family, about how to have better conversations with your own kids without getting overwhelmed by the schedule and the busy-ness. Do you do that at dinner time? Do you, I mean, what, what do you do that might be able to help parents kind of get a little bit better at making time for these conversations?
Natasha Crain: Yeah. Well, I think it’s two-fold. I always kind of refer to it as using moments and creating moments. So, let me explain what I mean by that. When I say ‘using’ moments I think is what a lot of parents tend to depend on and a lot of times we’ll call these ‘teachable moments’ right? We think of those things where something happens and we say, “Oh, this is a good opportunity to point out X, Y and Z.” And, you know, we use that moment and it’s a good teachable opportunity. And those are so important for sure, to just be able to point those things out and to make the most of those kinds of teachable moments you have to of course first be aware of the things that need to be taught. And so, again, that’s a lot of where my passion lies is helping parents understand what those things are so that they can see the opportunity and kind of have that radar up of opportunities to point something out. For example, you can be in the grocery aisle of the store, like I said earlier and you can see something on a magazine cover that is very contradictory with a Christian worldview and you can use those as opportunities to say, “Hey, you know, how does that differ with what we believe as Christians?” Just simple things like that. So that’s one of the using the moments. But, the reason I say that too many parents depend on that is that there’s so much our kids need to be taught and that they need to learn that you’re not necessarily always going to find a teachable moment for it so you can’t sit around waiting until there’s this perfect moment to talk to our kids about whether or not the Bible supports slavery, that just might not come up at some point until they’re actually challenged on that subject by someone and at that point you know, it might be too late. So, it’s really important to create moments as well and to set aside that time. In as much as it can be difficult to find time and schedule, like I said, if as Christians we’re really taking this seriously and we really believe that there are eternal implications for our kids and their relationship with Jesus then it should be a no brainer that we have to set aside those times to have those conversations. So, for us, we do that on Sunday nights and we set aside that time and we do a Bible study. We’re studying the book of James, or we’ve been studying the book of James and we sit down and we go through our study guide that we’ve been using and we talk about it. Sometimes we have questions nights like I mentioned, which are just amazing. If you’re listening to this and you haven’t really put anything formal in place like a structured time each week with your family, that’s a great way to start because it’s just a time to sit and talk and see what questions your kids have. So, we incorporate questions nights into that. And sometimes we just bring a question proactively to those, so maybe it’s not a Bible study night, maybe we say, “You know what? Tonight we’re going to talk about question 5 from this book, “Talking to Your Kids About God” for example. And that’s just the best way really to make sure that you’re getting in front of your kids the conversations that you need to have regardless of whether or not it happens to come up when you’re passing the dinner rolls. So, I, I always encourage parents, “Think of those two things. Think of both ‘using’ moments and ‘creating’ moments but in both cases it requires the parents to be equipped with that understanding first of what needs to be taught.
Jonathan Morrow: Yeah. No, I completely agree ‘cause, you know, you’ve all been in situations where it’s if I understand kind of at least basically where this conversation is going to go then I’m kind of calm, not defensive, everything else and we’re able to help navigate whether that we’re interacting with people who are hostile to our faith or questions that our kids have or anything else. So, understanding what they believe about these topics and being exposed to it is so critical. Well, I want to go back to real quick, something you were saying about your um, the Bible study that I think is awesome. So, you’ve got I think, seven and eight year olds so for the parent out there wondering, “What does that actually look like? Does everyone sit neatly and listen quietly or squirm? Is this four hours of memorizing the book of James? Like, give me, give me a real glimpse into what that actually is like so we can just help, help parents kind of, kind of envision this.
Natasha Crain: Yes. Lest anyone think it’s anything like what you just described and my kids are sitting perfectly. No, it absolutely isn’t. I mean some of those nights are a train wreck especially my, my younger one; she’s seven but, kids are, you know, they’re all over the map in terms of their, their development levels and their interest levels and all those things. So, we do require that they come in and sit with us for the conversation and I also require that you’re not rolling around on the floor, literally. And if you are, we’re having that much trouble with it and then you can get ejected from the family Bible study and it has happened. So, yeah, you know, in, in, I have not but you might hear that and think, “Oh, but then some kids will just want to be ejected.” Well, not necessarily because if you’re keeping it relevant and interesting then they’re not. And I think part of it too is that we’ve done our best to develop kind of a love for the Bible and, and talking about how it’s so important. I mean I, I realized one day that my kids have never seen me reading the Bible because I read my Bible on my iPad so they have no idea what Mommy’s reading, you know in the morning and at night. So I actually bought a physical Bible so they could see that I’m reading my Bible regularly. So we explain to them and we’ve taught them how you actually go about reading the Bible and so that piques their interest in it too. I know growing up in church and spending you know, hundreds of hours in church and growing up in a Christian home, I actually didn’t learn much about how to pick up and study the Bible on my own so that’s been a passion of mine with my own kids. And because of that they look forward to coming in and they get to look up the passages themselves, we take turns reading it in like different translations so that they can hear that and we talk about what those things are. And, like I said, we also mix it up so it’s not just a Bible study. Like some nights we’ll do a questions night or sometimes we’ll throw out an interesting question. We bring a lot of, you know, questions that we just hear, like in the news for example; I heard somebody say after the, the horrible church shooting in Texas, you know, I’m, not just one person but many people on social media saying, “Well clearly God doesn’t exist because He didn’t save those people.” So, that’s an obvious opportunity in my mind that you take that kind of thinking to your kids and you say, “You know, I heard somebody say today that God must not exist if something bad happened to people while they were sitting in church. Do you think that’s true? Why or why not?” And, that’s a whole conversation starter. And so, kids who might not necessarily love studying the Bible at this point in their life, if you mix up Bible study and conversations and you, and you pull all these things together, I assure you that they actually do become interested because when you start making them think about those and, “Hey, I heard this. What do you guys think? Do you think that’s true?” You really pique their curiosity and you, and you get them thinking about those things. So we usually, we only plan for doing half an hour but usually we end up spending about an hour just because there are questions and conversations going on. So, I’d say a half an hour is a very reasonable amount of time to start with as a family to find 30 minutes a week to do that. But yeah, it doesn’t look perfect at all. I mean we have, my younger one falls asleep sometimes in the middle and I don’t go run, you know, shout in her ear or anything like that. So you don’t want them to hate it, you want, you want them to come and you know, take an interest in it. And we also give them active things to do, like they each have a notebook and, and a pencil so that they can write down like the things that they’re learning and kind of keep track of it like that. And, my daughter’s more interested in doing that part of it than my sons so it just depends on their personalities but working with them and not expecting perfection but having the discipline like we were talking about to keep doing it no matter what. And if you do get off track, get back on track.
Jonathan Morrow: No, I love it. Thanks for sharing that. You know I can completely agree, there’s been times where it’s, “Hey, we’re going to sit down,” and you-you’re envisioning as a parent and say, “Oh, this is going to be such a special moment. It’s spiritual. It’s going to be awesome.” And you’re like, “Totally did not go the way that I envisioned that.” (laughter)
Natasha Crain: That’s exactly right.
Jonathan Morrow: So, hope…
Natasha Crain: My daughter now, my eight year old daughter, she thinks it’s fun to make up a song about whatever you know, we were learning, kind of a humorous song at the end and so we always tell her, “Okay, you can do that at the end.” So like she looks forward to that. And my, my son will make up a little skit or something so yeah, you know, it’s just kind of working with their personalities so that it’s something that they actually enjoy.
Jonathan Morrow: Absolutely. So, what I’m hearing and what I hope parents are hearing as they listen to this is take the pressure off but also be intentional, right? So, I mean, just find some space, find some time. This is such a great tool. I’m talking to Natasha Crain and her excellent new book is called, “Talking With Your Kids About God, Thirty Conversations Every Christian Parent Must Have,” forwarded by our good friend Sean McDowell. And so, it’s just a great resource to help prepare you for some of those conversations. But, you know, as you interact with, with parents, Natasha, what, what’s maybe one of the most common questions you get from parents around kind of this space of talking with your kids about God or worldview or apologetics.
Natasha Crain: Let’s see, the most common question. Well, hon-honestly the most common question is, you know, “Do you have, what book do I give my kids?” Everyone, I get emails about this and, and people comment on my blog or reach out to me on social media and they always want to find a book that they can give to their kids because parents always understand that the world is getting really challenging, they don’t know really what to do about it or how to define that and then so they’re like, “Well, just give me the book to give my kids so that that can help them.” And, you know, there are some really good, great resources that have come out especially J. Warner Wallace’s, you know, “Cold Case for Kids” and “God’s Crime Scene for Kids” and Melissa Cain Travis has books like her Young Defender series so there are some great books available and we should absolutely make use of those as parents but ultimately, the, it comes back to us as the parents to be the primary spiritual influence or be the one who can have those conversations because they’re going to finish reading those books and they’re going to get some great information but it is a matter of an entire childhood we’re talking about. And so, being the parent, we have to be equipped to have that knowledge and to know, “These are the things that I need to understand and here’s how I’m going to have those conversations with my kids.” And just being able to have the confidence of doing that. And I think that’s what a lot of parents do lack is the confidence and they just say, “You know, I just want somebody who’s an expert on this stuff to write the book so I can give it to my kids and they can explain why there’s good reason to believe Christianity is true.” But we should understand that as parents, right? We should understand that every Christian, we should all be prepared to give the, the reasons for the hope that’s within us. So, if we can’t do that with our kids, then we have kind of our own credibility on the line, I think. So, we need to be the ultimate apologists in our kids’ lives.
Jonathan Morrow: No, I think that’s great and I think that’s really important because you know, ultimately our kids are going to kind of look at the way we see and relate to the world and they’re going to kind of take their cues on, “That’s the Christian life” or “That’s the way you do these kinds of things.” And so, I think it’s critical that, you know parents are equipped in these things and really appreciate you writing that book. You know one of those questions where I think a lot of parents don’t feel equipped, and I know you talk about it in your book, “Talking With Your Kids About God” is the area of faith and science and maybe, you know if you know, scientists are all atheists or science is somehow disproving God. What, what’s maybe one thing you would do to kind of help maybe prepare a parent to have a better conversation with, with some of their younger children especially on these questions of faith and science and even how to frame some of these questions?
Natasha Crain: Right. Well, that’s a huge question because obviously it depends on the specific topic that we’re talking about but just broadly speaking, you don’t have to, as an encouragement, you don’t have to be an expert on science to understand kind of the, the big picture of what we’re talking about with these kind of conversations. And, one of the best things that you can do in helping you kids even from the youngest age when you get in these conversations and I focus on this a lot in that section of my book is just defining terms, you know when someone says that science has disproven the existence of God, well, what do you mean by God and what do you mean by science? Two people who are saying that same sentence can mean completely different things. You know, one person might mean that they’re talking about God just as a potential supernatural being who may or may not have created the world and is not even interacting with it and if that’s what they mean, even most atheists acknowledge, “Well, science of the study of the natural world has nothing to say about something that might exist beyond that.” But most of the time when atheists, the very vocal atheists like Richard Dawkins, for example is saying that, that science has, has shown that God doesn’t exist, he’s talking about specifically the God of the Bible. And if you get more specific to that then you’re talking about specific claims within the Bible and specific areas and especially talking about age of the earth and evolution. So, you hear these big sweeping statements about science and God but if you really drill down to it, they’re talking about some very specific questions within science where you’re looking at the mainstream scientific consensus and you’re looking at that versus certain interpretations of the Bible. And so, when you really get specific like that, it helps to narrow down kind of like I said what we’re talking about; it’s not this whole huge dilemma of science versus God, we’re talking about some specific issues and ultimately in, in terms of a framework for thinking of those, ultimately the accurate understanding of scripture, the accurate interpretation of scripture and the accurate interpretation of the natural world will never actually be in true conflict because all truth is God’s truth. And so, I think we can help our kids see these discussions in light of that kind of framework, it’s very helpful so that they don’t see it as pitting science against God. And it’s also, on the other hand, it’s also real important to help kids understand how science and the Bible are complimentary. I have a chapter in the book also about that, just looking at how the world is understandable and it’s discoverable because it’s orderly and we wouldn’t expect that on a view of the world that’s just totally materialistic where things just came into being by blind evolutionary forces but you would expect that if there’s intelligence behind it. So, the very fact we can do science because there are things that are consistent like gravity a-and the laws of nature, it actually is evidence that points toward an intelligent being like God. And the fact that we can even do science with our reason, that’s another kind of complimentary between science and Christianity because again, if it’s just a blind, blind force universe and everything develops by evolutionary forces then we wouldn’t expect to have reason, reliable reason that helps us to discover truth. So, all of these kinds of things are ways that we can help our kids understand, “Hey, yeah, you’re going to hear about these different conflicts between certain interpretations of science and certain interpretations of the Bible and here’s how we need to look at those. But also you need to understand in many ways that science and the Bible are complimentary.”
Jonathan Morrow: No, I think that’s great. I think helping kind of frame and as you say define your terms and just kind of getting clear about what we are and aren’t talking about, what the objections really are and then how important they are, ‘cause some questions are more central than others, for example that God created is more central than how God created, you know, those, those kinds of things.
Natasha Crain: Right.
Jonathan Morrow: And so, this is, I love the conversations that you have in your book about these things but you, you end your book with a chapter on Biblical hope and so maybe just say a little bit about that. But, why does Biblical hope matter? Maybe especially now more than ever as we kind of enter into this kind of post-Christian culture and kind of an increasing secularization, uh, why does Biblical hope matter?
Natasha Crain: Right. Well, that, that chapter caps off the book and it caps off a section of six chapters on the difference God makes. And in each of those chapters I look at the difference that you have in your worldview if you’re an atheist versus a Christian, a theist but specifically a Christian. So, that the questions like the meaning of life and what do we make of evil and what should you do with your life and ultimately why does Biblical hope matter? And one of the things that I keep coming back to there is that so often is that atheists will say, “Well, I have meaning to my life and I have hope in my life.” But ultimately we have to ask, “How meaningful or hopeful those things can be?” You know, we can have hope that we’re going to find someone that we love to marry and we can have hope that we’re going to find a good parking spot tomorrow or hope that we’re going to be cured for cancer, whatever the kinds of hope might be, we can have those kinds of hopes but ultimately in an atheistic universe, all of that is just going to be meaningless when eventually when all of us are gone and the planet’s gone and everything that happens that scientists say will happen in the future. So, you know, ultimately, yes, you can create a subjective meaning. You can say that my life is going to be all about turtles if you want. But the question is, “Is what is the evidence for God’s existence?” Because if there is good reason to believe that God exists then there is actually a purpose for our lives, there’s an objective meaning to our lives and there is a real and true hope that we can have eternal life and it’s not the kind of parking space hope that people have, it’s not even the kind of hope of being cured from a terminal disease or anything like that, it’s an actual hope that’s well justified for eternal life that our lives have a reason, that there’s a purpose for us being here, that they mean something in a much bigger sense than just what’s going to happen here on this earth at this point in time. And that ultimately is the most amazing hope that we can have and that’s the hope that we’re offered in the Bible and it’s not a delusional kind of hope in that it has no justification. To the contrary, we have so much justification for believing that Christianity really is true and that we can have that hope of being together with the Lord forever.
Jonathan Morrow: No, I completely agree. I love it. I think that’s so important to ground. It’s not wishful thinking, it’s, it’s Biblically rooted, it’s rooted in history and that hope is real and that’s what we need to give to this next generation. My guest today that I’ve been talking with is Natasha Crain and her brand new book is, “Talking With Your Kids About God, Thirty Conversations Every Christian Parent Must Have” and I’ll have links in the show notes to this excellent book that you definitely need to pick up and I want to tell you about a couple other resources as you’re thinking about the next generation. One, here at Impact 360 we’ve been studying Gen Z with the Barna Group over the last year, year and a half, which is the next generation after Millennials, and kind of what are their assumptions and values and worldview and how are they seeing the world and we’re going to be unveiling this research on January 23rd and if you go to whoisgenz.com you can sign up for the live webcast, the national simulcast event for that or come to the live event here in Atlanta at whoisgenz.com. Also if you have students, teenagers and you want to see them kind of equipped to grow in their faith, you know, check out Impact 360 in terms of our summer programs and experiences as well as our nine month Christian gap year for our Fellows and things like that and learn more at Impact360.org. But, Natasha where can people learn more about your blog? I know you write a lot and have great articles and great content there so where can they find you online?
Natasha Crain: Uh, you can go to my name: NatashaCrain(C-R-A-I-N).com My blog’s called Christian Mom Thoughts and ei-either way you get there at the same place, so that’s where I blog and I usually blog about three or four times a month.
Jonathan Morrow: That’s awesome. So, maybe as we wrap this up, give parents one last word of encouragement as they kind of get ready to have better conversations with their kids about faith and about God.
Natasha Crain: Yeah, I would just say don’t be intimidated by the challenges of today’s world. It can be scary and we can be really concerned about our kids growing up in it and we can be concerned for their faith but it’s not a matter of fear because truth has nothing to fear and when we start to understand that then we stop being so intimidated by it and we stop realizing, “Well, of course there’s something I can do because Christianity is true.” And so that just leads us to have that sense of urgency and sort of inspiration I think to want to do something, to get out there with our kids and say, “Hey, we’re going to take this thing and we’re going to do it and we’re really going to do what it takes in order to prepare our kids for this world because we know that that’s the most important thing to do.”
Jonathan Morrow: Absolutely. That’s awesome. So again, grab a copy of, “Talking With Your Kids About God” by Natasha Crain, an excellent, excellent resource. And if you enjoyed this conversation please take a minute and rate this podcast on whatever podcast app you use. That helps us out and helps spread the word to equip more people. And we will hope to see you next time and pray that God will empower you to have all the influence He has called you to have this week.
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