Balancing Act

I've written before about the conflict I feel with people of faith, not because of their faith, but because of my lack thereof.

This weekend our niece is being confirmed. I explained confirmation to my kids, who have absolutely no concept of it. We will go, we will celebrate with our family, and we will give a lovely necklace commemorating the date with a Bible verse on it. (Numbers 6:24-26, the benediction. I am a heathen, but I made that choice after learning a whole lot of Bible stuff, including a lot of verses.)

Our church has a program similar to confirmation, called Coming of Age (COA). It's similar to confirmation in that they learn about religion (although they learn about many faith traditions, rather than a comprehensive history of one faith), but completely different in that in confirmation, one is recognized from that point on as an adult member of a congregation. It's sort of the end of a journey. COA is the opposite. This from Wikipedia:
"COA signals the beginning of individual spiritual searching; it is an official recognition that the youth involved have begun to search for personal truth."

I have a lot of respect for individual faith journeys and I would never demean or denigrate someone else's belief system. I am glad to be included in family celebrations even though I don't share the same beliefs and I'm not teaching those beliefs to my kids. I just hope the journey my kids take, even though it's very different from the one all of their cousins will take, will be supported and celebrated the same way.