Some Are Just for Keeping

Last Tuesday, driving my daughter home from her cousins’ house, she started singing to herself in the back seat — no performance in it at all, just a made-up song about the moon following the car, half words and half hum, completely unaware I could hear a note of it. My hand went for my phone before I’d even decided to reach for it. That clip would kill on the family group chat. Grandma would lose her mind over it.

I got the phone halfway out of the cupholder before I put it back.

Not because there’s anything wrong with sharing a cute video of your kid. I’ve done it plenty, and I’ll do it again. But something about that particular song, in that particular light, felt like it belonged to exactly the two of us and nobody else — not because it needed protecting from some danger, but because not every good thing that happens in my house is raw material for an audience. Some of it is just supposed to be lived, once, by the people who were actually there.

She finished the song. I didn’t say anything. She had no idea it was the best thing that happened to me all week.

Not Yet Old Enough to Say No

A handful of state legislatures moved on “sharenting” bills this year — laws aimed at the parents, not the platforms, who turn their kids’ childhoods into a running feed. A few states now require part of the money made off a child’s likeness to be set aside for the kid once they’re grown, the way child-actor laws have worked for decades. Researchers keep flagging the same numbers: by the time an average kid turns thirteen, thousands of images of them already exist online, posted by someone who loved them, who never once asked if that was okay — because the kid was never old enough to be asked.

I don’t think this is a story about bad parents doing an obviously bad thing. I think it’s a story about all of us, doing something so normal it doesn’t feel like a decision anymore. A kid does something funny, or beautiful, or hard, and posting it is just what you do with a good moment now. The applause comes fast and it feels like nothing.

In Mark 9, the disciples are arguing about which of them is the greatest — a very grown-up argument, all status, all who gets counted. Jesus doesn’t answer them with an argument back. He puts a child in the middle of the circle, wraps an arm around him, and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” He doesn’t use the child to make a point and move on. He puts the actual kid in the actual center of the room, and lets that be the whole answer.

That’s the thing I keep circling back to. A child, to Jesus, isn’t a device for making an adult point — not even a good one, not even a point about how great kids are. A child is just fully, immediately real, worth stopping the whole argument for.

I don’t think the fix is never posting a picture of your kid again. I think it’s smaller and slower than that: asking, before the phone comes out, whether this particular moment is for them or for us. Some moments are for sharing. Some are just for keeping.

Scripture: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” — Mark 9:37

For the little ones: Ask your kids what’s something they did recently that made them feel proud, even if nobody else saw it. Then read Mark 9:36-37 together. Tell them: Jesus picked a kid — not a grown-up, not someone important — and said that kid mattered enough to represent Jesus himself.

Discussion Questions:

Activity: Pick one good thing that happens this week — a joke, a drawing, a goofy dance — and agree as a family to keep it just between you. No photo, no post, no group chat. Just talk about it at dinner and let that be enough. Pray together and thank God that he sees every one of us fully, whether or not anyone else ever does.

”Every plant in this garden started as one seed somebody had to decide to plant,” Grandpa Eli said, straightening slowly from the row behind them. “Even the ones that don’t come up. Even the ones that come up wrong.”

”What happens to the ones that come up wrong?” Lilly asked.

”Depends what you mean by wrong.” Grandpa wiped his hands on his trousers. “Sometimes a plant gets a start it shouldn’t have. Grows up crooked. Takes more than its neighbors, without meaning real harm by it. You can’t always undo a bad start once it’s already growing. But you can always cut it back. Let it grow different from where it stands. That part’s never too late, so long as there’s a season left to do it in.”

”That sounds like more of a person thing than a plant thing,” Oliver said.

”Does it,” Grandpa said, in the voice that meant he’d noticed Oliver noticing something.

That night, the well woke again — colder this time, calling deeper into autumn than it ever had before. Oliver and Lilly are about to find out exactly whose season is running out.

That’s the opening of Return Before Snowfall, Book Three in the Tales from the Well series — a story about a boy who ran from a mistake two winters ago, and the terrifying, necessary work of turning back around. Books One through Six are all out now, and if your reader’s already met Oliver and Lilly, this is the next stop on the path.

Grab your copy of Return Before Snowfall on Amazon.

May you catch the moment before it becomes a post, and choose, at least once this week, to just live it instead. May your kids know they don’t have to perform to be worth your whole attention. And may you rest in this: long before anyone else was watching, you were already seen, fully and completely, by the God who knit you together in secret.

Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.

See you next Thursday.

— The Well & The Word