Time and One Christian Homeschooling Family

What do you teach your children about time? 

I get asked this question a lot and the reason I get asked this question is because the Man is a geologist.  As a geologist, he deals with dirt, rocks and resources that are labeled as billions of years old, and his science focuses on the "old earth" teaching.  This is what we teach our children too, and here is why:

There has to be a scale.  Someone could classify the epochs and eras in "do, re, mi, so, fa, la, ti, do" and it would serve the same purpose as classifying in billions or millions of years.  We could have alphabetize the findings, but really using numbers serves this purpose just fine.  The kids learn that something is a little older than something else.  It doesn't mean we are teaching our children to not trust in God by teaching them a number system for classifying the ages.

Man is fallible.  God is infallible.  While the Bible is God's word, it is translated by man.  I can go to the old King James Version, the Standard American Version, and the New International Version for Kids and find verses that are ever so slightly altered in each translation.  The meaning is still there, I do not doubt that for one second.  My understanding of the general idea is not altered.  With that, I don't really know how long a generation was in the times of Genesis.  There are people who say with great conviction that they can figure this out, but I can't, and honestly, I'm not too worried about that.  Why?  Because it doesn't affect my faith in Jesus Christ as my Savior.  It doesn't matter to me if this world is 100,000,000,000 years old or 10,000 years old.  Jesus still came to earth to die for my sins and he still rose the third day.  My belief is God's plan for mankind is not altered by an argument about the age of the earth, fossils, or the existence of dinosaurs versus dragons.  It is all an argument on semantics to me, and while fun to pursue with adults for the sheer joy of the study of words, I won't introduce it to my children at a time when they are growing in both faith and knowledge.  This argument is not one that we depend on in order to lead our children down the spiritual paths we wish to see them follow later in life--and if it is, we need to question what exactly are the basic tenets of our religion.

I could spend the rest of this entry typing biblical references such as Ecclesiastes 9:12 "For man also knoweth not his time...." in order to convince the reader that I am not wrong in my assessment that teaching a millions of year time scale to my children will not destroy their faith in God, but I won't.  There are so many references to time in the Bible, and if you have the time on your hands to search it out, you can go to www.biblestudytools.com and type in "time" and then spend a couple of days following every reference to ferret out whatever meaning supports your personal hypothesis.  I would do this myself, but at this time I have a child begging me to tie his blue-footed booby feet onto his shoes.