I read an interview with Dan Brown, author of The Divinci Code, in the paper yesterday. Who do you think turned him into the religious skeptic the book seems to portray? ...a bad friend, aetheistic teachers, unbelieving parents? Wrong! It was his minister.

According to Dan Brown, at a very crucial time in his life he went to school and heard the Big Bang Theory. Being a very religious kid, he also went to church and heard that God created the heaven and earth. So what was the answer? He was struggling to fit all of the pieces of the puzzle of religion and science together in his own mind. When he asked the question, his minister's response was that nice boys don't ask that question. And guess what? The science teacher was only too happy to explain his theory in a way that made sense to his young mind.

The truth is that kids have questions. The questions are big. At some point every human has to come to grips with how to interpret the world around them. The even scarier truth is that it's not always the person with the right answers who takes the time to answer those tough questions. When we avoid them, they find the answers somewhere. It might be in a book, from a friend, off a movie, or even a teacher at school. But the fact is that we won't have the opportunity to help them understand and leave them vulnerable to very slanted or even perverted viewpoints.

We must never forget that our children will get an answer to their questions! It's just a matter of who or what is providing those answers.