Spiritual Cleats Needed
by Heidi Bratton in Faith on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 6:00 AM
Our five oldest kids have all played soccer. They love the game!
I, on the other hand, am only beginning to understand it. At the start of our first soccer season, years back, I had no clue what type of equipment the kids really needed in order to play the game. Fortunately, the town recreation department issued shin guards and tube socks.
But when the kids suggested their need for soccer cleats (like their teammates), I was pretty sure the “need” was really a faddish extra, like sweatbands, only more expensive. Each kid already had a perfectly good pair of tennis shoes, and these seemed good enough to me for running after a very large ball on a very flat field.
Boy, was I wrong!
During the opening few minutes of her first “real” soccer game, our especially enthusiastic 6-year-old daughter and her teammates looked like a herd of wildebeest stampeding after this checkered ball that had a mind of its own.
Unfortunately, every time my poor daughter tried to make a quick turn or to stop, her feet slid out from under her, and the cleated herd trampled her. It quickly became clear that her flat-bottomed tennis shoes weren’t going to cut it. She needed to have a little more grabbing and holding power against the other players or she wasn’t going to survive her first season in one piece.
The first thing Mom learned about soccer was that cleats are not faddish extras.
Get Ready for the Game
Properly equipping kids to walk the Catholic walk is not unlike properly equipping them for a soccer game. In fact, in the New Testament we are instructed to, “Therefore, take up the full armor of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm (Ephesians 6:13). Against a stampede of worldly ideas and people, our kids need spiritual cleats. They need a little Catholic grabbing and holding power, so every passing herd doesn’t trample their faith.
What might these spiritual cleats look like? What types of things will ground children deeply in their faith in Jesus Christ thereby helping them stand firm in that faith? Among the most important things are formational types of experiences that will leave positive impressions in their minds about the abundant joy and blessings of the Christian life. Here are a few ideas:
1. Get to Church. Make going to Mass as natural and desirable as breathing air. Don’t make attendance a question mark or a battleground every Sunday. Just go, and go joyfully. And, go expecting some gift of grace or understanding from the Lord because He wants to give it to you.
2. Faith-filled Media. Fill your home with good Christian media and music. Let it be contemporary Christian rock music when the kids are teens. Attend Christian rock concerts together. Watch Christian movies. Read Christian periodicals and newspapers.
3. Get On Your Knees. Pray yourself. Pray with your kids. Pray for others. Pray for healing, for forgiveness, and in thanksgiving. Try different styles of prayer; perhaps the Rosary, perhaps extemporaneous prayer. Charismatic and contemplative prayer are both parts of our Catholic heritage. Try them both.
4. Know the Bible. Cultivate in your family a love of Holy Scripture. Read Bible stories to the kids from birth, and give them their own, age-appropriate Bibles. Attend Bible study groups.
5. Love! Love your spouse. Love your neighbor. Hold your tongue. Show with your actions, as well as your words, that Jesus is the Lord of your life.
6. Be a Model. Give the kids role models in the Faith. Teach them about the Saints of long ago and missionaries of today. Put up posters of Catholic heroes in their rooms right next to the sports heroes and movie stars! You might even take one or two of the secular posters down to make room.
7. Serve Others. Do good deeds in the name of Jesus. Get the whole family involved in a neighborhood mission project. Financially support missionaries.
By visualizing each of these ideas as a single prong on the bottom of a pair of spiritual cleats, you will see that the more prongs the cleats have, and the stronger each prong is, the less your kids will slip and slide on the soccer field of life. Spiritual cleats are not faddish extras for Catholic kids; they are proper and necessary equipment for the game.
—Heidi Bratton is amazed to have found her niche as a wife and home-schooling mother of six children ranging in age from 2 to 20 years old. She is author of Making Peace with Motherhood…And Creating a Better You
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