Every parent worries about how they will handle the big three conversations with their kids: God, death and sex. My boy just turned two so I felt pretty comfortable that all of those conversations were a ways off.

That said, life has a way of surprising us as any parent can probably tell you. My son loves to sing, dance, draw, and do puzzles. While he has an obsession these days with pirates and dinosaurs, his new favorite song is Peter, Paul & Mary’s  Kumbaya . We mostly sing the first stanza:

Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya

Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya

Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya

Oh Lord, kumbaya

He gets a lot of pleasure out of the song, but when we were sketching the other day, he told me to “draw kumbaya.” I proceeded to write out the lyrics. But he was not satisfied at all – which is not surprising, as he doesn’t read yet. He kept insisting that I draw kumbaya.

Clearly, I was a little slow at first, but eventually I realized that he didn’t simply want a picture, but he wanted to understand what he was singing. My son asking me to draw was a way of communicating that. Other songs that he likes to sing, like  Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star  or  Itsy Bitsy Spider,  are more or less well understood by him.

While he didn’t really know it, he was asking a very profound question. I started into an explanation of how there are some things we can see and some things like God that we can’t, which was probably pretty unsatisfactory to him, as most of the vocabulary I had to use was new to him.

I had been thinking for a while what role God would play in our family life. I had just finished reading  The Blessing of the Skinned Knee  by Wendy Mogel, which talks about the importance of religion in community and creating a strong family, so it wasn’t as if I was unprepared for this. I had just always imagined that my wife and I would be leading the conversation, not our son.

I am sure this was the first conversation of many that we will have on the subject. Hopefully I’ll be better at explaining things the next time. At least I have some insight now into why God is frequently pictured as an old man with a long beard. That’s is something we all can draw.

Mark Spellun writes the blog   www.naturaldad.com , which describes his family’s journey as they raise their son who was born in 2010. You call follow him on Twitter @TheNaturalDad.