I Regret Not Introducing My Son to God

Religion wasn’t something I was attracted to as a child, despite occasional exposure to it. We would go to church infrequently, and I didn’t authentically understand the Christian faith or what it even meant to “develop a relationship” with God. It’s a puzzling concept to most people, but particularly children–a relationship with a thing you can’t see or touch.

Instead, I questioned if God was real and pretended to believe in Him when I didn’t. I wanted to be like everyone else, but after being abandoned as a child, it was more plausible to me that my Heavenly Father left me behind just like my earthly father had. In my mind back then, that was what fathers did.

When my son was born, the question of religious upbringing crossed my mind. How would I raise my son? How do I explain to my son who God is when I don’t know him myself? I didn’t think it was appropriate to “lie” to my son about the certainty of God’s existence when I didn’t believe it myself.

A few years later, I began publicly stating to people in my life that I wasn’t a Christian and that I had settled on the status of being agnostic. I felt that saying “I don’t know” to notions of God was more authentic than proclaiming to be someone I wasn’t and holding up a value system I wasn’t sure had any divine basis.

I despise lying to people. I quickly and reliably fill with guilt when I indulge in dishonesty, something manifested from the conscience I now know God bestowed upon me from birth. If only I knew back then who gave me the conscience that guided me toward honesty years ago. It’s a gift, and I had no means by which to feel grateful for it.

Even though I had settled on the label of being agnostic, I avoided the question when it came to raising my son. We built a relationship based on constant communication and honesty, yet the “Topic of All Topics” never really happened between us…

I didn’t talk about God, and he didn’t ask me about God in return.

I avoided religion because I didn’t have any answers for him. Telling my son how indecisive I was about existential questions such as God’s existence felt deeply pitiful to me. So I ran.

As my son got older, I figured he would at some point stumble upon God on his own and he could decide for himself, and so I discarded all my responsibility as a father to help guide him toward God’s grace.

Five years ago, after a series of supernatural events experiencing what I know today as the Holy Spirit and encountering a demonic entity, I returned to the big questions for myself. The Topic of All Topics.

The question, “Is there a God?” was replaced with “Who is God?”.

I started going on a slow walk toward faith in total solitude. These were internal battles I had with myself over the years, and they forced me to reconcile with my childhood hurt of feeling alone and forgotten by God.

It’s all so unexplainable to me now. There were these moments when everything was going wrong and yet beauty sprung out of it abundantly. There was this feeling I had of being led places to encounter people with whom I’d later develop deep relationships and experience God.

I’m all for coincidences, but there were too many signs for me to avoid this simple conclusion.

God was not only real, but He had never abandoned me. He was in pursuit.

“I never had the experience of looking for God. It was the other way round; He was the hunter (or so it seemed to me) and I was the deer…”

- C.S. Lewis, 1963

In July 2024, I was baptized in a lake in Stone Mountain, Georgia in front of my family, while making a promise to God to be truly born again and accept the responsibility of being a faithful Christian. After the baptism and in the presence of my family and newfound Christian friends, I couldn’t help but think about my son.

I had answered the most important questions of life after leaving them unsolved for decades, and now my son was an adult who didn’t know of God.

Although it was euphoric to proclaim Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in front of the world, I felt a deep private pain over not approaching the conversation with my son, who needs both of his Fathers’ guidance to truly prosper in this life.

Whenever that regret would hit me, I’d pray to God to watch over my son and help show him He exists just as He did in my own walk.

I sent my son an audiobook called “Imagine the God of Heaven” by John Burke, which discusses near-death experiences. My hope was that it would get him interested in asking more questions and I’d periodically check in with him to get his thoughts about it.

A couple of weeks ago, my son told me that he began listening to it and he expressed that the book was interesting, but that he had something else really important to tell me.

He detailed how months earlier, shortly after my baptism, he was struggling to find a new job in the town he’d moved to and had become depressed over it.

He came across a video online talking about Jesus and he’d decided to pray every night for God’s help and even attended a church that Sunday. The following week, he found a job in a place that he enjoys and today he’s thriving in his new position.

As I was reading his text, my eyes swelled with tears of joy, and only two words came to mind to send back to him:

Praise Jesus.

God answered my prayers by finding a way to reach my son and opening the door for us to have a long-overdue conversation. But with God, there’s no such thing as too late.

Adam B. Coleman is an author and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. He writes on Substack at Speaking Wrong At The Right Time.