J.M. Boyd is a husband to Abby of 25 years next year. They live in Langley with seven children, one who just left for college. We asked him a few questions about sending his kids out of their home, and essentially what he’s learned in equipping them to be resilient in the world. He shares with us the things he has accumulated, learned, and weaned from others over the years.
What kind of fears and worries were leading up to sending your first kid to college?
When she was getting ready to go off to school, I really started asking, “at what point am I going to be okay letting my kids go out into the world? When can I feel good about letting them go? What do I need to teach them?” The list just grew and grew in my head - there was so much I wanted to pass onto them still but just not enough time.
But as I’ve been going through losing my mom and thinking about our relationship in the midst of all this, I’ve been reflecting on these things and something became clear—there are no perfect boundaries or safety nets to give kids.
I started to realize that there are only two things that I need to teach my kids:
Their unique identity in God - so who He has made them to be specifically with all their fears stripped away
And how to talk to God - so how to hear His voice & understand when He’s talking to you
Everything they do can be done through this filter. What university should I go to? What should I study? Should I be in this relationship? In this field? In this city?
All they have to ask is: Can I operate in my identity in this context? Within this relationship? This decision? This city?
How do you help them know their unique identity?
This is something I’ve done all their life. Obviously you get to know them the older they get, but it’s wild to see how fast their personalities start to reveal themselves early on. My wife and I try to call out their natural gifts and virtues like their creativity, generosity, etc. We try to encourage them that they can hear from God, and that He wants to talk to them and tell them who they are.
Once they get into their teens, I make it more of an event. We go for a walk, or to our cabin, and go through a simple format of talking to God: Allowing for free flow of your mind, and understanding the difference between you and God speaking.
How do you teach them between your own thoughts and God’s?
It’s challenging for sure. The reason I even began thinking about all this was because I struggle to hear God’s voice myself.
Before any of it, I invite them to think about God as bigger than their own minds could construct. It’s pretty crucial in trying to wrap your head around relationships and conversing with God. Most of us perceive God in a human form: An old wise man, a father figure that resembles our own father dynamics, etc. We naturally put him in a box because that’s what we know.
But God is so big and completely outside our own understanding. He’s not just connected to nature and matter, it’s everything. It’s impossible to even try to conceive Him. That might feel overwhelming but it’s helpful just to open ourselves up to Him.
So when I first take my kids out with this exercise, I usually take just one of them away with me to our cabin or out in the woods. We go out into nature or on our dock where we can feel away from everything else. Then we go through a few key things:
Confession
Making a confession out loud (not the sacrament, but just a practice) is the starting point. I invite them to say what they really believe about God, about themselves, and about others. I let them know it’s okay to yell. To be scared. To have doubts. I make sure they say it out loud so it’s not stuck in their head. When we say out loud the truth about our fears, it releases its power over us.
I have discovered even through my own journey that if you don’t start with honesty, you can’t get to that next place. It’s the foundation for intimacy. If you don’t let it out, everything will be clouded by those thoughts. And it’s not that God needs it. It's for us, not Him.
It’s such a critical foundation for relationship with God and getting to know Him. It lays it out that those fears don’t have authority over us. I try to encourage them not to apologize for their perceived reality, but just to tell the truth about it. I encourage them that it’s not about saying sorry but repentance and turning to a new way. God’s truth enables us to believe in that new way, which leads us to acting in a new way. And His response is always grace. Almost every time I do this, I hear in my mind God whispers, “Great—let’s work on this.”
Silence the Room
Next, we acknowledge that God is here with us and HE CAN speak.
I’ll say a prayer for them where I thank God for who they are no matter what they believe about themselves, about Him, or others. I remind them that when He made us, He thought of us and all the intricacies of their personality. He put it in their DNA. He wants us to understand our identity and live it out because it draws us closer to Him.
I also pray the Creed, claiming Jesus' authority and power over them, and that by his death and ultimate sacrifice of Love he destroyed the enemy and those thoughts have no place in our minds. I pray that here in God‘s presence that He would silence the enemy around us in our mind in our life. I recognize that we are so used to listening to these fears to the enemy into the world. We pray, in the name of Jesus, for a fullness of God's spirit to sanctify our minds in our imagination. I ask God to silence our own thoughts and to fill us up with His spirit and silence our own voice in our mind so that we can hear from him in a deep new way like we’ve never before or even for the first time.
It’s a declaration of faith. And if they start having doubts, we round back to confession, telling God they have doubts. I then invite them to ask Him to remove their own thoughts so they can hear His. I call this silencing the room.
Asking For the Next Thing
After confession and silencing the room, I lead them through asking God: What’s the most important thing you want to say to me right now?
And everything you think comes to mind, you just start writing or talking out loud. There are no thoughts filtered or needed to be evaluated yet on whether they think it’s them or God. They write it down, or for some of them, it’s easier if they say it out loud to me. I just give them safety to say all the things. Oftentimes, these are their biggest fears. Fears they have about the future, themselves, or who God is.
Oftentimes when my kids hear back from God the first time it's usually negative, and that's their own fears, their own false identity, translating what God says into a negative thing. Maybe they hear, “you're not doing this enough or you're not spending enough time with me.” But that's not how God operates. I remind them that God doesn't speak negatively to us. He doesn’t guilt you or shame you. He always affirms and challenges, inviting us to be in deeper relationship with Him.
I explained that it’s not that we’re not hearing God when that happens but it’s our own thoughts and fears that are distorting what He is trying to say.
Once we get it out, and are seeing it clearly, I have them ask God: What do you need me to know about this?
This is my favorite question. And one of the most important in my prayer life. We often go into asking God why. But we’re questioning the expert on life, and our life. You don’t ask a professor why, you trust that they know how to distill what you’re looking for. You ask them what you need to know. You let them consolidate the right information that is relevant to you and take that in.
Because they are often fears, instead of just leaving those fears out there, we ask God about them. What do I need to know about these fears? How do I get past these fears? What do you say about my fears? Be curious about the things He’s saying.
This is the foundation to equipping them to be able to hear how He sees them and who He has made them to be. I want to teach them to converse with God. I know God will show up for them.
And where does the identity part come in?
The identity piece is something I try to do over their life.
God wants to tell us His name for us—but it comes with relationship. When you start to hang out with someone, it takes a while for them to call you their nickname. He’s not going to just say it unless you ask Him. Unless you spend time with Him. Unless you grow in a relationship with Him. The more you do, He’s going to reveal it to us.
I wouldn’t call my kids “JM’s daughter 1, JM’s daughter 2”. I have names for them as a father because I know them, I have the impression of who they are, just like He has the impression and He knows who we are meant to be.
I use nicknames on my kids too as soon as I start seeing their personalities emerge. I use words like: My Warrior, My Peacemaker, and My Dreamer. I’ve gotten to see how God sees them so I try to do my best to speak that into their life.
How powerful is it that they get glimpses of who God has made them to be right from the start? As they enter into more and more decisions for themselves, they both have a foundation of who God has made them to be, and also hopefully, practicing that ongoing conversation with God - full of vulnerability, honesty, and guidance.
Now, when my daughter gets into a relationship with someone she’s going to ask, can I live out my identity with this person? With this career path? If you know who you are in the deepest sense, you aren’t looking to other relationships, careers, or things to identify you.
Any other advice you’d give to speaking identity into your kids?
My mom taught me this: “we are only born with two fears: fear of falling and fear of loud noises.”
Later, a coach helped me distill this concept even more: Someone taught us all the other fears because of a broken relationship and we adopt it as a layer of our identity.
The more we know who we are, the more I think we can combat fears, and that’s the journey towards sainthood. Look at the saints and bible figures — unafraid. Joshua put musicians at the front of the battle. Noah built a boat without a flood. St. Catherine of Siena was illiterate and had to figure out how to write to the pope. They learned to be fearless no matter what people thought.
Fears hold us back. This is why we start with confession and truth—getting through the fears so you can discover who God has made you to be.
And I think the more my kids live outside fear, the more they live into the identity they’ve been given, the more courage they will have to follow His voice and His guidance in life.
I always tell them to keep asking: God, what do you need me to know? About any situation - joyful or difficult. We don’t always need to know everything. It all comes back to a real, intimate relationship with God.
God just wants to be our best friend. He wants to be the one we go to when things are good or bad. Because the end goal is just a relationship.
