It’s an ordinary mid-morning on a Thursday, except the weather is pristine, near perfect. The sun is shining bright and the air is dry. I’m sitting on the front steps while the boys climb up and down the front-yard tree.

“It’s crazy for me to think God wasn’t born,” Oli pipes up.

I smile, delighted by this random musing. It’s a familiar hang-up with him. For about a year, he’s been trying to wrap his mind around this “crazy” notion.

“Yea,” Bronson chimes in. “It’s crazy to think that God was before everything else. There was no earth or anything and God was there.”

“Yea,” I say, “It’s all really wild, isn’t it?”

Suddenly the nothingness of our Thursday feels perfectly timed. I’m grateful I get to hear these beginnings of their faith. They’ve both been asking good– and hard —questions regularly since they were tots, but mostly at night when we’re reading their Bibles and they’re stalling bedtime.

This feels like something new — like their hearts and minds are thinking through faith on their own in the middle of climbing a tree, like faith is beginning to take root in them apart from our coaxing.

“Even though we don’t know all the answers or even fully understand what we do know, we can still choose to believe. That’s what having faith is.”

I’m trying to affirm their thoughts and doubts and questions while still nudging them to faith.

“Yep,” Bronson says, and they’re both climbing back up the tree.

That was it — just a two-minute tidbit on a Thursday morning. It was the best part of my day.

Later when I can’t fall asleep, I think about how much I love those moments — how I’m completely delighted by their questions, not at all disturbed.

When I was a kid, I thought belief and doubt were opposites, and in some ways they are. But I think God is actually delighted by our questions, our curiosities, our doubts when we bring them to him and ask with genuine wonder, even if we’re adults and our wonder is frequently tinged with anger.

We sometimes think God is disturbed by our lack of faith so we try to shove aside our doubts and questions, but those very questions and doubts are part of a journey to a deeper faith. Doubts are only disturbing and faith-disrupting if they lead to disengagement. Showing up with our questions grows our faith.

So I hope the boys keep their questions coming, whether its bedtime or mid-tree climb.