I’ve spent hours in the car with Sawyer lately. In these final weeks leading up to college, I’ve driven with him to new student conferences and college camps that are meant to prepare freshmen for their new life. During one long drive, I thought about how I had a chance here to teach him some things, to say some things that I want him to know and understand about being a Christian in this big world, to give him some important words of advice that would carry him through. But I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Instead, we listened to music and talked about the way it made us feel and how the drums sounded and what we guessed the meaning of the songs were. We talked about the Marvel universe and Star Wars and all the movies we’re excited to see in the next year. He slept, and I drove. He drove, and I worked. In the in between moments we rode in comfortable silence, just a boy and his mom, not trying to manufacture some transfer of wisdom from older to younger, just enjoying being in the same space.

I thought about that for days, about how I couldn’t seem to come up with any earth-shattering truth to dispense in these last few weeks. But it dawned on me that godly wisdom and truth isn’t really transferred that way, in a last minute scramble to say all the things we wish we had said. If Sawyer has benefitted from any of the better parts of my Christian life or Chad’s, it’s because of a lifetime of spiritual conversations, and, even more, a lifetime of living a real, imperfect, sometimes struggling devotion to Christ alongside him. My faith in Jesus and his faith in Jesus, though separate, are also intertwined in ways that are scary and beautiful and God-ordained, and I doubt anything that I could think of to say at this point would be a revelation to Sawyer.

I’ve said so many things in his life. I’ve done so many things, things to learn from (both what to do and what not to do). He has seen it all, taken it all in, and now it’s all a part of his spiritual DNA, which is both encouraging and a little terrifying. In this, too, this transfer of faith, I’m compelled to trust God and hope and pray that the Holy Spirit showed Sawyer what he needed to know through my spiritual wins and my utter failures, the wise things I imparted and the wicked ways that I sometimes set the exact wrong example. I pray that the Lord has shown him how to be and how not to be, and that he knows in all of those failures that Jesus still loved me the most that a person can be loved, and that I still loved Jesus, too.

He is his own man, and he loves the Lord. The bulk of my influence in his life has already passed us by, and no last second platitudes or rules for living will be what he remembers at this point. In many ways, there’s real comfort in that, knowing that no single speech directs our children as much as the day in, day out, sometimes monotonous journey of living the Christian life as we raise our families. All those days that felt uneventful were so much more important than we thought at the time. The biggest faith lessons are instilled in our kids on the normal days, when their parents’ imperfect devotion to God becomes a way of life for the whole family.

We don’t have to be good at making speeches. We just have to answer our kids’ questions with honesty and biblical truth. We don’t have to think up all of the things that a person should probably know in order to honor God with their lives. We just have to teach our kids, little by little, what the Bible says. And then we have to show them, decision by decision, how what the Bible teaches affects the way we live. It’s baby steps, really. His whole life has been slow and steady baby steps, ours and his, to this moment in time. And in truth, that’s what the whole rest of his life will be, too: baby steps of faith.

I have no speeches planned for his college drop off, no last second advice. I’m not sending Sawyer out into this world all by himself. My good God goes with him, and I trust that He will never stop teaching Sawyer, or me, what love and truth and mercy and obedience look like. Sawyer flies from this nest on the wings of God’s goodness, and I’m grateful.