Why I Teach Kids

A friend of mine recently flew down to Sacramento to run a marathon in the rain. I have to admit that my first thought was to ask him what planet he was from. My second thought, however, was a bit more introspective: “What propels this man to fly to California to run 26 miles for 3 hours and 30 minutes in a downpour, beating his body to the point of sheer exhaustion?” So I asked him.


He said that he needed to run in the race and finish under a certain time, to qualify for the Boston Marathon, a lifelong dream of his. Ah, then I understood! He was striving, enduring, and punishing his body because there was a bigger prize at stake. It’s always the bigger prize, or the higher purpose, that drives us to accomplish the smaller things along the way.

I’ve never thought of applying a running analogy to teaching kids the Word of God, but I guess it fits pretty well. Like running a marathon, teaching kids isn’t for everyone; in fact, it might seem just as crazy to some as running 26 miles in the rain. Distractions, noise, short attention spans, separation anxiety, unique learning styles and even tears are just a regular part of any Sunday morning in the life of a children’s worker.

Everyone knows that the marathon is a culmination of months of training out on lonely back roads; no one else around, wondering to yourself if all the hard work will pay off one day. Such it is with teaching kids, as we spend Sunday after Sunday in the back rooms of the church, never fully knowing how much of the Bible lesson stuck, or whether that craft effectively reinforced the Biblical truth.

But God knows….and He uses the Apostle Paul to remind us of the importance of our work, spurring us on to “run in such a way as to get the prize” (1 Cor. 9:24), and encouraging us to “not become weary in doing good” (Gal. 6:9). Most importantly, God wants us to “stand firm in one spirit with one mind, striving together for the faith of the gospel” (Phil. 1:27). I like that phrase “striving together”, because it reminds me that we are not alone, and that God is equally interested in the work He’s doing inside each of us, as He is in what we teach or how we care for the little ones.

The process of teaching kids is a not a sprint, but a marathon, one worth striving for when we think of these children as the next world changers and history makers of our time. They will one day sit in the same church rows that we sit in, hold places of office in the cities we reside, and work in the businesses that we now patronize. And even more than this, they will advance the road of the gospel to the ends of the earth, and that alone drives me to continue to press on, striving forward and together for the faith of the gospel.