I think our kids need to hear about the martyrdom of Stephen. Mine are too young for all of the details, but even at 3 and 5 they can begin to see different ways in which Jesus’ promise to be with his disciples always holds true, even when the rescue doesn’t come. As an aside, I don’t know that I would have chosen to talk much about death, yet, if our grandparents’ deaths hadn’t already forced it. Nevertheless, at some point all of our kids need to hear about God’s faithful presence in death because they’ve already heard so many other biblical stories of God’s heroic rescue from death.
Let me explain. In a cursory reading, the Bible may not be immediately reflective of our experiences as followers of Christ. Woah. Wait. What?! By no means am I challenging Scripture’s truthfulness or relevancy. But by its very nature the Bible tells the noteworthy stories in Israel’s history. It compresses entire lifetimes into a few pages of highlights, years of waiting and struggle into a single sentence. But that sentence is often where we live.
Therefore, by faithfully reading these Bible stories to our children, I think we can unintentionally set them up for disappointment by constructing a world in which God always acts in these miraculous ways when we faith-fully pray for them.
And let’s be honest; this disappointment can devastate our faith.
But God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, God’s ways higher than ours. And we still live in a deeply fallen world. So stories like Stephen’s (told in Acts 6-7) can give our children a template for believing God’s promises and expecting God’s presence even through suffering.
And that template can save their faith.
As I was telling my own kids this story, my three year old asked if God sent an angel to shut the angry men’s mouths (as God had with the lions in Daniel’s den, which we’d read earlier that morning). “No, this time God did not send an angel to rescue him… This time, God’s Holy Spirit filled his heart and opened his eyes to see Jesus!” Though I hadn’t before considered the value in doing so, in that moment I felt so thankful for the chance to begin shaping my kids’ imaginations to expect God’s presence in death.
Our kids are going to suffer. People for whom they pray will probably die. They may even be persecuted. So let us resist the tendency to tell stories only of God’s miraculous intervention. Let us also tell these harder stories now, that our kids’ faith might be better prepared to stand through the storms that will inevitably come.
And now for full disclosure... I didn't have the brilliant idea of introducing my preschoolers to Christianity's first martyr on my own. We're going through the book of Acts in Bible Study Fellowship, and it just so happened that I was assigned to teach this lesson to a group of 3-4 year olds. It felt quite daunting, but I obviously came to love the story. Here's my script for that lesson, if anyone wants a better idea of how I taught it, hopefully in an age-appropriate way!
