“Mom, I’m excited about   … I’m not sure what. What am I doing later? I’m really excited about something, though!” my 13 year-old son Tristan said to me on the way to the grocery store today.

“I wonder if it’s the Holy Spirit. That can make you feel like you are full of joy but it’s not related to something happening in the external world,” I responded.

Tristan loves to get excited with anticipation, and although my husband and I share with him ways to stay in the moment and not get caught up in waves of excitement and disappointment, buzzing about upcoming plans is a familiar feeling to him. He was trying to make sense of the unfamiliar experience of joy for no apparent reason, but his usual m.o. wasn’t getting the job done.

I thought back to a recent conversation we had about encountering God. This is a challenge for adults, and an even bigger one for kids. We were on our way to Mass Saturday evening when Tristan complained that he doesn’t know anything about God. “He’s not even in time! How am I supposed to get to know Him?!” I agreed it’s a challenge, but suggested that when he is altar serving that evening, he might imagine that He is serving Christ and not just Fr. Matt, and ask God to reveal Himself to him.

I was in the meat aisle when I realized, “You asked God to reveal Himself to you, didn’t you? And now you are feeling His response, the Holy Spirit coming to you!”

He thought for a moment and said, “You could be right, Mom.”

I am always looking for opportunities to help Tristan encounter God and build a relationship with Him, without dumbing down the process or annoying him. Here are a few of the more fruitful methods God has shown me. I hope some of them might be useful to you.

1. Share your own faith day to day. Ask God for help and thank Him out loud when a prayer has been answered or you feel His presence.
2. Talk about God. Explain what He does and doesn’t do. Base your comments on Church teachings so you and your children will have a foundation of Truth and not impressions, feelings, or culturally accepted but inconsistent ideas.
3. Listen to podcasts or watch videos together about topics your kids will (mostly) understand. I use Word On Fire materials by Bishop Robert Barron, as we as EWTN programs like "Called to Communion". Some of the content won’t make sense to a child, so use those answers to educate yourself so you can explain it to your child in a way they can understand.
4. Encourage them to keep trying. The devil wants us to give up. God wants us to pray unceasingly, always listen for Him and to share our lives with Him. Let your kids know that there are counterforces that don’t want them to reach out to God and they should fight against those.
5. Help your children pay attention to the quiet way God speaks to us.
6. Explain that God isn’t ignoring them when they pray for something that doesn’t happen the way they asked. This is something you will have to explain with more complexity as they get older. Start simply and allow them to bring up their frustration often.
7. Accept within yourself, and then explain to your children, that suffering is part of life. Suffering doesn’t mean that God wants us to suffer, doesn’t care about us, or that He doesn’t exist at all to protect us from suffering. But God does allow suffering and free will, and there is a way to use our suffering to purify ourselves and make ourselves closer to God. Suffering can be deeply meaningful. One way to make our suffering meaningful is to use those opportunities as a way to surrender our will and rely on God as a child relies on a parent.
8. Explain how beautiful the faith of a child is to God, and how much God appreciates their small sacrifices and virtuous behavior.
9. Ask them to think about how God would choose to reach out to His children since He doesn’t have a body or a physical voice, and isn’t physically able to communicate with us. I often tell Tristan that if I were God, I’d reach out through mothers and fathers, friends and strangers, and work through the people in our lives. He also sent His Son, who spent His adult public life healing people and teaching us, forming His Church that would continue through the ages, and asking us all to do His work in the world -- including leading our children to Christ.