“But God …”

My husband Dave and I have three young children (6, 4 and 2), and one of the things we like to do with them at Easter is learn a memory verse together. This year, we chose to do Romans 5:8.

I’ve tried to make it fun as well as educational, so I broke up the verse into individual words or phrases, put each in a little box (with an Easter egg), then numbered them and put all those boxes into a basket. The kids have to rummage through the basket every night after we’ve read a bit of the story leading up to Jesus’ death and resurrection, and find the box with the next number. When they’ve found it, we add the next word or phrase to the memory verse up on the wall.

It’s all been a lot of fun, and it’s delightful to see the kids getting visibly excited when they find out the next part of the verse. It’s like a mystery unfolding—and yes, they enjoy the chocolate too! But what’s surprised Dave and me this year is that it’s also created some (unplanned) teaching moments with them.

The first night, for example, we started off with “But God”. Rebecca (our 4-year-old) said, “But that can’t be right! It sounds like it’s going to have a sad ending when it starts with ‘but’!”. Dave pointed out that the sentence before could have had something negative, and the “but God” could be introducing something good.

The next morning at breakfast, the kids were still thinking about this. Rebecca started guessing what might have come before and after the opening words of the verse: “On Easter Friday, Jesus died, BUT GOD made him alive again”. Jacob (our 6-year-old) joined in: “Bad people made a plot to kill Jesus, BUT GOD … had already planned this to save us”. A string of other possibilities followed in between mouthfuls of Weet-Bix. You might like to see how many Easter-themed “But God” sentences you can make up!

Even if our kids never end up remembering anything more than the first two words of the verse, I reckon they will have learned a very important part of the Bible!