Present with God: In my Flannelgraph

…continue in what you have learned and have firmly beleived… -1 Timothy 1:14

If you grew up in a particular time period and in a particular corner of the global church, flannelgraph has a unique place in your spiritual heritage. These fuzzy visual aids were the primary tool for teaching bible stories to millions of little bible students for decades worth of Sunday school classes. I don’t imagine in today’s media-saturated culture, they would be terribly effective, but for many of us, they were formative to our understanding of the Bible.

Each of us has a heritage of faith that we have received from someone. Although the Bible tells us that it’s possible to have worked out this God thing on our own simply by observation and investigation, none of us in this culture probably have. Whether we came to Jesus from the nursery or later in life, we all have been guided to faith by parents, friends, pastors, and teachers. As Paul writes to his young protege, Timothy, he reminds him to resist the urge to minimize his own “flannel-graph heritage.”

We are often tempted to novelty, even in our understanding of God. And it is true that God expects us to persist in growth and maturity in our faith. But we must also make intentional space to reflect and honor the understanding of God which we have received. Theological innovation is often a path toward heresy and we must constantly check new ideas against what we know and are convinced is true. When we make intentional space to reflect new understandings or challenges against our old assumptions, we invite God to remind us of the truth of what we have learned. While our understanding of the life of following Jesus can evolve, rarely will the basics of what we believe truly change.

It is in motion and passion that new ideas can appear extremely seductive, but it is in stillness and reflection that their truth or error is ultimately be revealed.

Be Present with God

Make some time to be present with God. Reflect on the early lessons about him and Jesus that you learned when you began your faith journey. Celebrate those early teachers and the investment they made in your spiritual development. Ask God to cause you to value those lessons. Thank him for the way he has worked in history to preserve and steward our understanding of him and his plan for our world. Ask him to protect you from both rigid fundamentalism and wind-tossed novelty. Thank him for the way he has made you aware of his presence during this time.