When Your Child Asks About Heaven: Christian Parenting When You Don’t Know the Answer

In this episode, Katrina shares the story of her seven-year-old asking whether we will know each other in heaven — and the panic, honesty, and searching that followed. This conversation is for the Christian mom who wants to raise her children in faith but still feels like she is learning too.

Through 1 Corinthians 13, James 1, and Deuteronomy 6, this episode talks about heaven, wisdom, family discipleship, and why saying “I don’t know yet” is not failure. It can be the beginning of faithful parenting.

Your children do not need you to have every answer ready. They need to see you go looking for what is true and bring it back with tenderness.

http://www.katrinagambill.com

Transcript

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My seven-year-old asked me something on the way to school that I was not prepared for. It was in the car because apparently that's where my children like to ask questions that I just do not know how to answer. I was still in that mode where you're just mostly trying to get everyone out the door, buckled with their backpacks and their lunches, and get out of the driveway without having to go back inside three times. She had been talking about Jesus coming back, about heaven, about all of us being there together someday. Then she got quiet for a second, and I thought she was just gonna move on to a different topic. Instead, she said, But what if we don't know each other in heaven? Because I heard our souls are different than they are here on earth. That's a direct quote from my seven-year-old. And for a second my mind just went blank, like completely blank, and then it started racing. Not in a calm, thoughtful, spiritually mature way, more like my brain was opening every drawer at once, trying to find anything that sounded even remotely like an answer. But she wasn't scared. That was the thing. She wasn't crying or panicked or looking at me like I needed to fix something. She was just genuinely curious. I think after a second she said, that would be really sad. But even that wasn't dramatic. It was just honest. Almost like she didn't realize what she had actually said until after she said it, which somehow made it harder because I was the one having an internal crisis. I didn't have an answer. What I had was this tiny little feeling of, I should know this. Like, how have I never come across this before? How am I the mom? And how am I trying to raise my children in faith? And how do I not know what to say when my daughter asks me whether we'll know each other in heaven? So I said what I usually say when I don't know the answer to something. I don't know. Let's ask Daddy. And honestly, that part was fine. That part was true. That part wasn't the part I'd go back and change. Welcome to Made for This. I'm Katrina Gamble. This is a podcast for the Christian wife and mother who loves God deeply but still finds herself overwhelmed by the ordinary weight of real life. Each week, we talk honestly about what it looks like to follow God in the middle of a loud, full, imperfect life by bringing the struggles of marriage, motherhood, emotional overwhelm, and spiritual inconsistency back under the truth of Scripture. Because your faith was never meant to work only in the quiet moments. It was meant to support you in the middle of your actual life. That moment in the car wasn't just about heaven. It was about something else first. It was about being the mom and still being the student. It was about having this little person in the backseat asking me something eternal and feeling like somehow I was supposed to be the one who knew, and I didn't. Keaton and I came to faith together. There wasn't someone in our house who had been doing this for 20 years. No one had a lifetime of scripture woven into their bones. No one had a ready answer for every hard question a seven-year-old might ask at 6:45 in the morning. We both grew up kind of faith adjacent. Our moms went to church, but we just weren't that into it. So when we got serious about our faith, we were all learning at the same time. Me, Keaton, the kids, all of us. And most of the time, I really do think that's beautiful. There is something sweet about our kids seeing faith become real in our house while it's still becoming real in us. But there are mornings when it doesn't feel beautiful. Instead, it feels exposing. It feels like standing in front of your child with no ready answer and suddenly realizing you are still learning to. And I don't think that insecurity shows up only with my kids. Sometimes I still feel like a fraud. Not all the time, not in a dramatic, spiraling every minute of the day kind of way, but sometimes, yes. Sometimes I think, who am I to talk about faith when I'm still learning so much of it myself? Who am I to guide my kids through something I'm still trying to understand? Who am I to answer questions about eternity when there are still so many parts of the Bible I have to look up and words I have to Google and ideas I'm still piecing together as I go? Maybe you know that feeling. Maybe it shows up when your child asks something and you don't know what to say, or when another mom seems to know exactly what devotional to do with her kids, or when someone at church references something like it's obvious and you're trying to act normal while internally thinking, I have no idea what we're talking about right now. It can make you feel like everyone else got the manual and you're raising your hand too late. But here's the thing I had to realize about that morning. I didn't lie to her, I didn't make something up, I didn't give her a spiritual sounding answer just to get through the drive. I said, I don't know, let's ask Daddy. And that was honest. The part I can see now that I don't think I saw clearly then is what happened later. I waited to tell Keaton because looking at the question felt scary and I didn't want to know yet. I felt like if I didn't ask, maybe I wouldn't have to know. I don't know if that even makes sense, but that's what it felt like, which sounds very mature and spiritually grounded, obviously. But it's true. Like the question was sitting there, and I knew I needed to take it somewhere, but I also knew there was a chance that I could find out something I don't think I wanted to know. So I just let it sit, which I can see now was not peace. It was really fear, but I was calling it waiting. After I said, I don't know, let's ask Daddy, she accepted it just because you know it's a normal answer from me completely and immediately. And then she went back to looking out the window. I did not. I kept that question with me. It came back to me at church because obviously, when you're singing about heaven and eternity and Jesus coming back, suddenly there it is again. The question from the back seat, the one you still haven't answered. And it came back at bedtime too, because bedtime is when everything gets softer and quieter and your kids look smaller somehow, even when they're not that small anymore. And I would look at her and think, what if she asks again? Maybe she forgot. The idea that heaven could somehow make us strangers, that transformation would erase what we are to each other. I didn't want to face that directly. And honestly, I knew Keaton didn't either. And when I finally told him, I told him straight up that I had been avoiding telling him. And his response was immediate and very honest. He said, Yeah, that's a no for me, which is same. We did ask her where she heard it, by the way, because I thought maybe someone had said something to her at church, or maybe she heard a phrase somewhere and filled in the rest. And she said, I don't know, I just thought of it. Which honestly feels about right. Sometimes kids don't need a source, they just look straight into the center of a thing adults have learned not to look at too long and ask the obvious question. And once she said that, I think the question felt even heavier to me because it wasn't something she had misunderstood from someone else. It wasn't some half-remembered sentence I could trace back and correct. It was just her thinking about heaven and thinking about us and thinking about whether love would still know its own people there. And she deserved more from me than my avoidance. Whatever we found, she deserved more than our fear of that question. And she had asked it honestly, so we owed her an honest search. What we found didn't just answer her question, it showed me something about wisdom, about motherhood and what God does when you don't know what to say yet. And it also had something to say about how faith is passed through a home, which thankfully is not as neat as I thought it had to be. So we'll start with the heaven question because obviously she deserves a real answer. And at this point, so do you. Maybe you've wondered the same thing and you've never said it out loud. Scripture doesn't give us every detail about what recognition will look like in eternity. I want to be very clear there. I don't want to make the Bible say something more specific than it actually says, but Scripture does give us enough to hope. 1 Corinthians 13 12 says, For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. Paul is at the end of a chapter about love, and he pulls back to show us where we are right now. We are seeing through a dim reflection. We are people on this side of eternity, which means we only ever have part of the picture. The full knowing is coming, but it's not here yet. My daughter's question kind of lives in that dim reflection. She was almost asking something that is unanswerable. It's something that is genuinely not fully visible to any of us from here. And I really needed that information because my first reaction was to beat myself up about not knowing. Like, see, you're too new, you're not ready. You don't know enough to be the one answering questions like this. But that's not what was happening. Obviously, I hadn't come across this verse yet, but me not knowing the answer wasn't because my faith was thin or my preparation was lacking. It was because she asked about something none of us have fully seen yet. Not knowing is not a failure. Sometimes not knowing is just the honest condition of being a person on this side of the glass. But don't stop there because Paul says something else. He says, Then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. He's not just saying we'll know more someday. He's saying there's a knowing that already exists, a full, complete, unobstructed knowing, and it's the way God already knows you. Right now, not someday. God doesn't see you through a dim reflection. He sees you completely, every part of you, who you are, what you love, who you love, the weight of your child's question when you least expected, the little panic in your chest, the part of you that thought, I should know this. He sees all of it fully. And that full knowing extends to the people you love. He fully knows your husband and your children, and he knows what those relationships are and what they mean in a way you and I can only partially see from here. But a God who already fully knows each of us individually and fully knows the love between us is not going to bring us into his presence and strip us of each other. The full knowing is more than the partial knowing, not less, it's obviously more. That's not something to be afraid of. That's something to hope for. We will not know each other less in heaven. We will know each other more completely, without the glass, face to face. Then I read James 1:5. It says, If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him. If any of you lacks wisdom, not if any of you who should already know better, or not any of you who has failed to prepare, or not any of you who is behind and needs to catch up before you come. If any of you lacks wisdom, ask God. And then this phrase, without reproach, I don't want to rush past that. God gives wisdom without reproach, without shaming you for needing it, without rolling his eyes because you had to ask, without treating your question like proof that you aren't qualified. That is important to me because the voice in my head wasn't cruel exactly, but it was accusing. You should know this. You should have come across this by now. And then later, don't look too closely, don't ask yet. What if the answer makes it worse? But James doesn't speak to the woman who lacks wisdom with accusation. He speaks with invitation. He says, Ask God. He gives generously, without reproach. And maybe that's obvious to someone else, but it wasn't obvious to me yet. I think part of me expected wisdom to come with a little bit of shame attached. So when your child asks you something you don't know the answer to, you don't have to scramble to become impressive, but you also don't have to sit in the dark with it. You can ask, you can go looking, you can say, I don't know that yet, and meet it as the beginning of faithfulness, not the end of your credibility. Eventually, we did go back to her with the answer. We told her that yes, we believe we will know each other in heaven, that scripture gives us reason to hope we will not know each other less, but more. And then I tried to explain the whole mirror thing fully known, face to face, and it was way, way over her head. I could see it happening while I was saying it. She was not tracking the full explanation, and she didn't need the whole explanation. She didn't need me to carefully walk her through every layer of that verse. She just needed the true thing her little heart had asked. Will we still know each other? We think yes, and she smiled. That was it. She was content knowing we would still know each other. I think that's so much of motherhood. We are carrying a lot of weight with questions. We are trying to understand the doctrine, the theology, the implications, the right language, the responsible answer. And sometimes the child in front of us just needs the true thing they can hold. Like, yes, sweetheart, we will still know each other. And that's the part I think I missed at first. I thought the whole point was whether I had the answer, but the point was also that we came back. She asked something real and we treated it like it mattered enough to go find something true and bring it back to her. And that's Deuteronomy 6 in real life, I think, not as a formal lesson or as a perfect family discipleship system, just the words on your heart making their way into the ordinary parts of your house. Deuteronomy says to talk about the words of God when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise. It doesn't require serious structure or a curriculum or a plan. And it especially doesn't require a mother who wakes up before everyone else and has color-coded Bible activities ready at the kitchen table. Although that would be really, really awesome. And for real, if that's you, I love that for you. But it's not me. That's just not the way faith gets talked about in our home. Sometimes it's in the car on the way to school or at bedtime when the question comes back to you, or it's Sunday morning already at church when Rosie suddenly remembers and says, Oh, did you bring my coin? Rosie's five. She goes to kindergarten class at our church and they fill a marble jar to earn time on the playground. They get marbles by bringing their Bible and a coin for the offering jar. At this point, she knows I put all the coins I find in her bag. So she has a little stash in there, but she still asks, usually when we're already at church, and she doesn't even really know what offering is. We've explained it to her, but what she really is concerned about is the playground time. And honestly, I respect that strategy because she's only five years old and she already thinks about bringing her Bible before church. She already thinks about the coin for the offering jar. This may sound small, but I don't think it is. It's habit forming. The habit is forming before the understanding is full. The understanding will catch up to the habit the way it often does with little people. Slowly, organically, because it's growing out of something real in the house. And then there's our 13-year-old. I actually had a hard time thinking of a specific example for him. I'm not always great about seeing the ways things are manifesting in other people. I think I'm still learning how to look out for that, or I'm not always in a position to observe it because of our household dynamics. So I asked Keaton. He reminded me of a story he had already told me, but it was like the moment. He said he had realized Emilio was actually interested in spiritual things when they were going dirt biking on Easter after the sunrise service. The conversation started working out what demons and angels are and the light inside people and what happens when that light is fanned or extinguished. No, it wasn't a clean theology lesson, but it was spontaneous and real, and he was engaged, like really engaged, thinking about spiritual things like they might actually be real, and Keaton saw that. I might have missed it had I not asked, because sometimes faith formation is happening in your house in ways you do not immediately recognize. Sometimes your kids are absorbing more than they can articulate. And sometimes one parent sees something the other parent misses. And sometimes your kids already know how the house works better than you realize. Emilio knows where to go for different things. He comes to me for emotional weight. He goes to Keaton for knowledge and the intellectual part. And honestly, that's just how it works in our house. That's how we work. I carry certain things, Keaton carries certain things, and our kids are learning that neither of us has to be everything for them to be held. Maybe that was me knowing our home and me trusting the way God is using both of us. I didn't really realize then, but I think I do now. That's not a failure, that's just a family. That's Deuteronomy 6 happening in an actual house, not perfectly organized, but real. A five-year-old remembering her coin, a seven-year-old asking about heaven in the car, and a 13-year-old leaning into a conversation after a sunrise service, and a mom who doesn't always know, and a dad who wants to find out. The words on our hearts make their way into ordinary moments. Think about your version of that car ride, the question you weren't ready for, the moment your child asks you something that touched a place in you that was already tender, the thing that came back to you at church and the thing that came back to you at bedtime, the conversation with your husband where you finally admit, I've been avoiding telling you this. That's not you falling short of what God asked. That might actually be you standing inside of the exact kind of ordinary moment Deuteronomy was describing. The words are already on your heart, spilling into real life, with your kids right there watching what you do next. They are watching. And what they're watching isn't whether you knew, it's whether it mattered to you, whether you loved God enough to feel the weight of the question and go find something true and bring it back. Whether you came back at all, you did and you will again. Your children don't need you to have every answer before the question gets asked. They need to see what you do when you don't have it. They need to see that you don't panic, that you don't pretend and you don't stop. They need to see that you go looking. And maybe they need to see that you don't have to carry the whole thing by yourself because let's ask daddy wasn't a failure. It was faith formation in action. It was me knowing where wisdom lived in our house and me trusting that God was using both of us. It was my daughter learning that questions are not shut down here. They're carried. They are searched out and they're brought back with tenderness. I think I used to believe my lack of answers was evidence against me. Like if I didn't already know, then maybe I wasn't qualified to guide them. But I am starting to think the lack of answers might be part of the invitation. Because when I don't know, I have to go looking. And when I go looking, my kids get to see what faith actually does with a hard question. It doesn't fake certainty and it doesn't run from fear. It doesn't make up something spiritual sounding just to end the conversation. It asks God for wisdom. It goes looking and it brings back what it finds. And maybe next time I'll go looking faster. That's probably the part I would change, not because the answer has to come immediately, or because every question needs to be handled before bedtime, but because there was no reason for me to sit in that fear for two whole weeks. No reason to let the question become bigger in the dark, and no reason to wait when God is not afraid of the question. That's the thing I want you to hear. You're always going to be learning, always. There will always be something you don't know yet, something your kids ask that catches you off guard, and something in scripture you haven't come across before, something that sends you looking. But the one answer you can know without a doubt is that the way is through him. So you can take every question there, you can take your child there, and you can take your uncertainty there, and you can take the part of you that thinks you should already know more than you do, and you can bring it to him. That's the thing that stays with them. There will be another question, maybe tonight at dinner, maybe tomorrow morning before anyone has had enough coffee, maybe in the car, because again, apparently that's where children do their deepest theological work. And when it comes, you don't have to have the answer waiting. You just have to know where to take it. Ask God for wisdom, bring it to the person who helps you carry what you do not carry alone. Go looking and come back with something true. So when the question comes, say it. I don't know that yet. Let's find out together and then go find out. Maybe quicker than I did, because God isn't afraid. And what you find will be worth bringing back.