Peanut Butter on a Spoon

When I was around nine, my uncle would come over to my grandparents’ house and fire up the grill. Hamburgers. Hot dogs. We would swim for hours.

At some point, my sister and I would be handed a spoon from my grandma with a scoop of peanut butter on it. No bread. No plate. Just peanut butter on a spoon. We ate it still dripping from the pool, as if that were the most normal thing in the world.

It felt ordinary. That is exactly what made it matter.

***

Deuteronomy 6:7 describes the transmission of faith in terms that most of us miss because we’re looking for the dramatic version. Moses doesn’t tell Israel to host conferences or construct formal curricula. He tells them to speak of God’s commands when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise. The ordinary rhythms of meals, commutes, and bedtimes are where the real instruction happens. Not the pulpit moments. The pool moments.

***

Looking back, I can see what I couldn’t see then.

Those afternoons were building something.

A boy doesn’t depend on a single pillar; sometimes he is held up by a network of people who don’t realize they’re holding anything.

Children learn stability through absorption. By being shown the world is not entirely hostile. That there are adults who are steady. That joy is allowed. That play is safe. That presence doesn’t always come with pressure attached.

That is what those afternoons did. They weren’t theology—but they were forming one.

***

Psalm 78:4 opens with an older generation committing to tell the next one what God has done — not hiding from their children, but telling to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord. The psalmist’s concern is that children would set their hope in God and not forget what he had done. But notice what carries that hope across generations. Faithfulness made visible in ordinary life, repeated enough times that it becomes part of how a child understands the world.

The worldview they quietly installed was something like this: you are not alone, you are cared for, and there is space to rest. When suffering later arrived and complicated my faith, I had something to lean on. Part of that was temperament. Part of it was grace. But part of it, I suspect, traces back to afternoons that at the time felt unremarkable.

Paul tells the Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 2:8), we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us. That phrase has always caught me. Not only the gospel — but our own selves. The message and the life behind it, offered together. What family gave me wasn’t a lesson. It was presence, people showing up, week after week. The theology I later came to hold consciously had an emotional template to rest on because others had lived it first.

We tend to think formation requires spectacle. That influence demands intensity or brilliance or carefully constructed instruction. But sometimes influence is a man tending a grill. Sometimes it’s a grandmother and a spoon. Sometimes it’s a patriarch who steps into a gap without drawing attention to the fact that there was one.

If you are a father, an uncle, a mentor, or a pastor, do not despise the ordinary days. The shared meals and the repetitive routines. The afternoons that blur together after a while. You may be constructing something that will hold a person years from now when the world feels heavier than they expected.

And if you are reading your own story backward, it might be worth asking: Where were the quiet places of stability? Who showed up more than you registered at the time? What ordinary rhythms formed you before you had any vocabulary for what was happening?