Radical vision casting – it’s what we as parents need to do if we are serious about passing on our faith. Take the Almands for example. They are in the middle of a one month church planting trip to the Dominican Republic. They are in the back woods on the side of some mountain.Whatever game-boy attitudes their teenagers may have picked up back in Georgia are being peeled away as they live alongside simple campesinos who have little, but hold everything they’ve been given with gratitude.

Everyday Mark’s children are confronted with poverty, hunger, and people without hope-without God. They are given the charge to bring Jesus to a lost world. Their band aid answers of “God loves you,” “God is good all the time” don’t work anymore.

They have the choice to wrestle with spiritual issues together to push through to a deeper, more meaningful faith as they seek to bring REAL love, REAL comfort, REAL Jesus to the campesinos.

They have to risk looking within their own hearts for answers:

Is my faith big enough to ask God to help these people?

Is the God I pray to really there or is He more of a genie in the sky who I bring my wish list to hoping I’ll get what I want?

What if I ask God to heal this person and He doesn’t?

Where will this person go?

What if I pray that God will meet their family’s needs and he doesn’t? What will they do?

The children are at a spiritual crossroads.- A benchmarking time for their faith. It’s those times of spiritual wrestling that we all need as our faith becomes our own.

Many of you parents reading this blog have just a few years left and the window is closing. You know in your heart of hearts that your children have not really embraced your faith. Maybe your children need a good reason why they should. They need to see its reality.

It isn’t too late to do what the Almand family is doing. Yes it is radical to take that kind of time off work. And yes those plane tickets are expensive. But how much do we parents spend on education? Usually it is far less than we spend on transferring our faith.