The snow was falling as we drove home. The baby had finally fallen asleep, and a rare quiet had filled the car.
We were nearly in our neighborhood when my eight-year-old daughter called from the back seat, “Mom, can we stop at the library to get the books I have on hold?”
“Sure.” I had been meaning to get there anyway.
I veered into the parking lot, but as I faced the backseat, my shoulders slumped. Unloading our bus of kids . . . in the snow . . . and waking a sleeping baby? I turned to my daughter. “Do you feel comfortable running in by yourself?”
She perked up. “Yes!”
I knew she was capable of handling the library, but the idea of my little girl crossing the busy parking lot solo turned my stomach. But she was so eager. After rattling off all of the requisite warnings, I watched her set off carefully.
The guardian angel prayer was on repeat in my mind as she navigated the cars and headed inside, and when she arrived back safely, she was beaming. “I did it!” I watched her clutch her books to her chest and smile the whole way home, proud of herself for accomplishing a full-on Big Kid Task.
One week earlier, I sat in the pews of our church as that same eight year old knelt in the confessional for the first time. We had spent months talking about God’s love and mercy, learning about sin and examinations of conscience, and rehearsing the prayers of the sacrament. She had been so ready, so confident, even as we waited in line together. As I exited from my own confession, she entered by herself, and I found a pew in which to pray my own penance. I prayed that she would love confession as much as I did, and my heart pounded as I worried if she would have a positive experience.
Suddenly, there was movement at my side. I turned to find a grinning little girl. She whispered, “I smiled the whole time.”
Holding back tears as she prayed her penance, I felt so blessed by the care that Jesus (and our wonderful priest!) has for her heart, and my heart swelled at His love for her and in gratitude that all went well. (In fact, she asked in the car if we could go back the next week!)
In the days that followed, I kept coming back to this moment with my daughter—my oldest, but still my baby girl—and praising God for His hand in the entire process. But what has also struck me is how much this sacrament marks a major transition in my daughter’s—and my—life.
Our family goes to Mass every week. My husband and I bring our kids along to confession. We have taken them to our Holy Hours, rosary groups, and family prayer gatherings. We pray together throughout the day as a family, and we try to witness to them the importance of our own time with the Lord. All of that to say, our kids are very much involved in our personal and family faith lives. But at the end of the day, my daughter had to walk into the confessional by herself.
Of course, we parents are still called to ensure that our children receive the sacraments and abide by the teachings of the Church while they live under our roofs. Ultimately, however, their faith cannot be forced. No matter what we do, we cannot force our children to know and love God and to abide by teachings that we know will bring them peace.
Still, we might agonize when they say they hate going to Mass, when they barely mumble the words to our family’s nightly prayer—let alone when they struggle with virtue or even fall away from the faith for a time. But the comfort is that we are not alone in our love for them. We hopefully have family, friends, and community who are forming our children, too. Even more importantly, though, God wants to draw our kids to His heart even more than we can imagine.
While He has given us these wonderful little humans, they are not ours, and this act of entrusting their souls to Him can feel supremely challenging. Our kids are their own little humans with their own little wills (and don’t we know it?), and they ultimately will have to walk the faith journey with their own two feet. There will be streets to cross along the way, but eventually, they’ll be so confident, we won’t have to hold their hands. Heck, we won’t even be by their sides. The comfort is that, even though we will have to allow them space to grow in the faith on their own, their Father will always be walking with them, too.
