Have you ever been walking through the grocery store and suddenly stopped mid-aisle, straining your ears to hear the piped-in music? Or maybe you’ve abruptly shouted, “hush!” in your car and cranked up the volume when a song comes over the radio. Before you can name the song or its singer, you know that it means something to you.
Neuroscience tells us that music seems to correlate with “positive emotional memories with social themes.” We also tend to have heightened recall for memories that took place when we were between the ages of 10 to 30. Maybe that’s why we can remember an obscure commercial jingle from 1998 but that new pop song everyone is raving about these days just doesn’t seem to stick with us. Maybe it’s also why, if we grew up in church, we can still remember old hymns and choruses that we may not have sung for the past 20 years.
For modern hymn writers Keith and Kristyn Getty, helping children grab hold of the truth through songs is a calling. On a recent Christianity Today podcast, Kristyn shared that their family started learning one hymn a month together. The lyrics lead to profound conversations, and the music sets words of truth deep in their children’s hearts.
“What we sing is incredibly important,” says Kristyn. “So much of what we sing is what we remember, and how we talk about our faith, how we pray, how we share our faith with unbelievers.”
Whether you’re humming hymns from your childhood as you make dinner or embarking on the journey of learning worship music as a newcomer alongside your children, Kristyn encourages you to see singing as an extension of your prayer life. By singing words of truth with your children, you can give them a precious gift: the chance to plant worshipful words in their hearts that will bloom for a lifetime.
