Graduating from the Kiddie Table

A long-standing tradition in our family is the kiddie table at large family gatherings. Always a smaller version of the adult table, my mother went to great pains to make it as pretty and with the same decorations. Over the years, debate went on about what age is appropriate for the “move up,” mostly by teenagers who thought their time had come to be considered more of an adult than a child. As a young mother, I thought the kiddie table was ingenious. I actually got to eat a meal and enjoy it among adults (!!) while the older cousins kept watch. For this reason, their moms probably made some of those cousins stay a little longer than they wanted to.

Finding a family photo of an Easter dinner together in the 1960’s (the inspiration for this drawing), I began thinking about spiritual maturity and how some of us would be very content to stay at the “kiddie table” of our faith for however long we could manage it. Sometimes, I feel like the spiritual maturity I have came kind of late, but God likely has the say so for when we are ready for the “move up.” Other times, I feel like there are areas of my life where I am trying to convince God I am not ready for the big table yet! I do feel pretty strongly though that in the years where I was a Christian without a committed prayer life, I was the one responsible for keeping myself a baby in Christ.

Eugene Peterson states: “The apostle Paul used growth words frequently as he urged people to enter into the full implications of their life in the Spirit. ‘When we become mature in the faith,’ he said, ‘we will no longer be infants,…(but) we will in all things grow up into him who is the Christ.’” (Ephesians 4:14-15).

By this time you ought to be teachers yourselves, yet here I find you need someone to sit down with you and go over the basics on God again, starting from square one - baby's milk, when you should have been on solid food long ago!
Hebrews 5:11-12 (MSG)