The Grossest With The Mostest

Today was the last day of school, and this means that after our routes today and again tomorrow we get to clean the interior of our buses.  Yea.  9 months of stinky, dirty, sloppy kids on the buses, and with the exception of sweeping out buses a few times a week, we don't do much to really clean the inside of the buses.  Honestly, they are kinda gross.  I do more than most drivers, windexing the inside of the windows 2-3 times a year, but the moment they get fogged up, combined with all the dusty we raise up, and then dirty fingers drawing pictures of penises and screaming 'HELP ME', they are just as nasty as they had been before. 

This is the third year in which I have done this job, and so my first job each year is to clean the space between the seat and the wall.  This doesn't sound so bad until you realize that many of these children are used to stuffing their trash down into the cracks of their couches, and this is little different.  So for almost an hour, you scrub out the candy, the wrappers, the pens, the occasional coins (18c today!), and almost anything else.  And your hands are just covered with a black goop by the time you are done, it's so nasty. 

After taking a well-deserved hygiene break, you then get down on your hands and knees and with a small broom sweep out the cracks and nooks of the floor to get all the dust off; eventually, you sweep everyhing towards the front of the bus, pick up the large pieces of debris, and then eventually sweet the dust and hair and other unknown into the wind.  This ought to be an EPA violation, but somehow it's fallen through the cracks. 

Then there's the wiping down every interior surface for germs...ceiling, seats, ledges, wheel wells, etc.  There's cleaning each window. There's the fun exercise of hanging on for dear life while trying to get all the bug goop off the front of the bus.  There's taking the shop vac to the area around the drivers' seat.  There's getting wet wipes out to clean the various cables, knobs, dashboards, and anything else up front.  There's opening up all the undercarriages and spraying 9 months worth of south-central Kansas county road dust.  And then, after yet another sweeping, there's a mopping of the floor. 

It's all really kinda sickening, but bus driving has never been the most glamorous of jobs.  I don't know that I've ever heard of any prestige bus drivers, who have a whole cleaning crew up to take care of any spills and messes.  If there were, maybe I'd be a bit more proud, though, and so my God givesi me the job of cleaning up the stink of our town's best and brightest. 

Old Age Awaiteth

This weekend my sister-in-law came to visit with her two younger daughters, age 3 and 1.  I love my sister-in-law and my nieces; but wow, the big takeaway from this weekend is that I AM OLD.  Upon arriving last night the two rugrats were all over the place, and we were chasing and chasing and chasing and by the time it was bedtime last night, I was exhausted. 

Today I did not spend that much time with them, as I made excuses to do the relatively easy work of cleaning out gutters and mowing the yard.  But the time I did have with them, they continued to run me and the rest of the adults and my own children ragged.  I made sure to point out to my teenage daughter (who loves children and is very good with them, BTW), that kids are hard work.  I probably should have pressed a little bit further with this and gone into the and that's why you must not have any at this time.  

I am going to be hitting my half-century in just over a year.  And while I have been struggling with back problems and that may be one reason why I'm not at full speed when it comes to keeping up with the rugrats, I'm starting to realize that there's a reason why I can't keep up with these kids anymore.  They are too much for me because quite simply they are too much.  We are not designed to be raising kids (or grandkids) into our 50s.  I don't want to be going to my child's preschool program having to be led in with a walker; kids need parents who are mature enough to be adults, but not so mature as to be old. 

They are gone now; my sister-in-law was going to stay another night before realizing that it was too crazy to stay here.  Our house is not child-proofed by any means and she was ready to get home and stay in her own bed with her own defenses against the kids.  I don't envy her at all.  I love kids, but I know that it's a good thing (knock on wood) to make sure that I don't have any more of them. 

Track Meet

I am writing from my daughter's first middle school track meet.  It's 75 degrees and sunny and hardly any wind...a perfect day for a track meet.  It's the first meet she is in, and she is running the 1600 meter and then an hour or two later the 800 meter.  That's a lot of running for her first meet.  Saturday I went over to the track with her and I walked while she ran.  At one point I decided to run with her after she had run 4-5 laps, and she took off.  I ran about a half a lap with her and then I was done...I don't know if it was fat old me, or young fast her, but it made me feel a lot better about how she might do today. 

In the end, I don't really care whether she wins or loses, I just want her to have fun and do her best.  I think she will be fine, really, but the dad within me thinks...GO...you can do this!  As parents we get older and fatter and at some point we decide to realize that we are not going to do much more athletically and we hand things off to our kids.  So we vicariously live and die with them.  We scream at officials, we celebrate their victories, and some day we pay off admissions officers at universities to ensure they get into a good college. 

This is why when somebody asks me now what my favorite team is, I no longer say the Royals or Sporting KC or the Chiefs.  It's whatever team my kids happen to be playing on.  The older I get I don't understand why people get so crazy about rooting for laundry.  Celebrate who you know and enjoy the rest. 

Thick Skin

One of my fellow bus drivers the other day came close to walking off the job.  The kids on his bus were giving him such fits that he had to switch with another driver and they drove each other's routes.  He's a nice guy, but I wonder if he is going to be doing this job much longer. 

Do any kind of job with kids, and you have to be thick skinned.  Kids of a certain age can be sweet, exhausting, cruel, kind, mean, annoying, helpful, and hilarious all in the amount of time that it takes you to tie your shoes.  They're kids.  They have brains that are not fully formed as of yet, and since many in this day and age are coming from homes in which they are not being nurtured or disciplined or parented with any kind of consistency it's not suprising that many of them are jerks. 

I'd like to think that I've developed a bit more tolerance in the 2+ years that I've been driving.  This isn't to say that I don't dream at times of taking certain kids and throwing them off of the river bridge that we cross over every day.  But I believe that most of us who deal with kids are in some small way enduring karma for the way that we acted when we were kids. 

I was not a terrible kid, I guess, but I could be a bit of a bully and truly obnixious if I thought it deserved my obnoxion.  When my two children today act up I don't like it but I see a lot of myself in them, and I see how I act with a lot of the same frustrations that my parents existed with me and my siblings.  And so, maybe this makes me more charitable as I get a bit older.  At least that's what I'd like to think about myself. 

Are Mermaids Real?

On my school bus today two of my first graders got into an argument about whether or not mermaids are real.  The girl had a book called "Are Mermaids Real?  (I Want To Know!)".  The Goodreads page for this indicates that this is a 'narrative text' that offers 'possible scientific explanations for the myths'.  She also insisted that when she had gone to the seashore that she saw one, she really did!  A boy, however, decided that this was all hogwash, and claimed that they don't exist, and even though he loves this little girl and tells her almost everyday that he loves her (and do you love me too?), that no way do mermaids exist. 

Of course I got asked what I thought, and I told the boy that if he doesn't want to believe, then he doesn't have to believe, and I told the girl that if you want them to exist, they are very real.  It was a craptacular answer, really, and even now I wish I had gotten into a better discussion with them about how you determine what is real and what is not, and the power of belief and myth and so forth.  But then I think, they are in first grade, why can't I just let them enjoy their little love spat.

It's hard to know how to answer anybody these days, in this time in which people generally believe whatever it is that they want to believe.  Believe in UFOs?  Trump?  Unicorns?  Goody for you!  For all the power of the information age, I am convinced that people are more ignorant than they ever have been.  There's no shortage of books that offer 'possible scientific explanations' for anything, but the explosion of narrative texts means that people now can find support for whatever it is they want to believe.  Not to mention the dozens of channels on TV that cater to whatever fringe idea somebody has, or the internet and its various forms of conspiracy theories and whackjob ideologies.  The information superhighway of the 21st century leads far too many people off of a cliff. 

Fortunately, the Goodreads page of this author who specializes in works for young children has many other works that are of a more serious nature.  And it appears that her knowledge base is as wide as anybody in this age...she has written on Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge (current events(; The Grassland Biome (science!); Counting Coins and Bills (economics), and whether or not King Arthur was real (history).  Oh, and don't forget her books about aliens, unicorns, and countless other creatures of the universe. 

I'm glad that my first graders have such an outstanding base of knowledge to work with. 

Home, Again

This weekend we went to my parents' home to help them as they begin to move out of their house of 43 years into a smaller, more convenient house.  They have already bought a new house and their current house is only being put on the market this weekend, but my thinking was that, with my parent's health being not great, we would help them move a lot of things, to help them do things that they simply cannot do for themselves.  If nothing else, we could start on 43 years of accumulation. 

It's never that easy, though.  I woke up at 6am this morning wide awake, ready to get to work.  Before they arose I started pulling off of the shelves many of their decorative cups and some of the 'special' dinnerware that only gets used a few times a year.  I thought I was trying to help, but I was being presumptive.  My parents, especially my father, kept explaining that 'it will get done', though nothing had been done and it seemed in my eyes that he was engaging in magical thinking.  After some arguing we finally figured out how to co-exist.  It's still their house, and I have to realize that it's still their leadership that will get them through this.  Long after we go home, they still feel responsible for this move and are not willing to give that up, yet.

The Bible continually speaks about the necessity to honor and obey parents.  And this seems to be a very real thing even when the parents no longer are fully capable of being the initiators as they once were.  I screwed up in not letting them go their own pace; I did not honor them fully by trying to make my plans for how they were to move more important than what they wanted. 

There will come a day when my children will have to take over some of my responsibilities for living.  I do hope that I am more willing to let this happen than my parents, but I doubt it.  I'm just as stubborn as they are, and as I my children get older I see more and more of my stubborn self in them.  Maybe they will be living on Mars by that point and we won't have to argue about these things...but even so, as long as I have my parents I need to do a better job honoring their wishes...even when they probably are not right. 

Pokemon Card Reality

My 11-year old son has been working hard to save money so that he can buy a Nintendo Switch.  Over the past few weeks he came up with the idea of selling his Pokemon cards, which he never uses anymore, in order to fund this new venture.  At first his idea was to take all his cards to a gaming store up in the city and see how much he could get...but I told him that this probably would not work.  So today we came up with a plan, to find 8-10 cards that were likely of value, some of which showed potential of selling for at least $10 apiece online, and then try some of the shops to see what we could get. 

It's always a fun lesson to watch children learn some of the realities of life.  My son was convinced that we would walk into these stories and they would start throwing big cash wads at him and the Switch would be as good as bought.  I was trying to tell him that it's not quite so easy...at worst people will try to cheat him, or at best the very nature of business means that the people who would buy his cards then have to turn and sell those cards in order to earn a profit.  To do a good deal is not only about you being happy, I told him, but about making sure that both sides are happy. 

We went to a few places but they didn't buy individual cards, so we finally went to a chain place in the mall.  We presented two of his nicer cards (one which we had seen had gone for $150 online, the other probably $50) and asked what they would give.  The manager, who didn't seem too interested, turned around and typed a bit on his computer and came back and offered my son 5 cents for the more valuable one, and 15 cents for the second. 

Now, because of our conversations my son wasn't too heartbroken, but he was almost offended at this.  The guy didn't want to make a deal, of course...but to insult somebody was just bad business.  While walking through the mall we went through a Sears that is going out of business because of bankruptcy proceedings, and my son was asking why businesses fail.  So I now had a perfect example of what happens when a business tries to screw over their customers or provides poor service.  Companies take a long time to succeed, but they can throw away their goodwill almost overnight when they act in bad faith.  We talked a lot about how car mechanics, or home repair businesses, or even card resellers can either do well by treating people right, or fail because they treat people badly. 

Hopefully my son learned a few things about life and business today.  If it took being disappointed in how people treat  him to understand this, then maybe it's not a bad thing.  And we'll always have the joke of knowing that bad businesses will try to offer you 5 cents because they are not ready to do the right thing.

The problem of bullying

As an employee of a school district one of the biggest concerns the administrators deal with (and teach us about) is the trouble of bullying.  Bullying causes kids to commit suicide, have bad lives, and hurts academic performance.  It's not just that bullying messes up those who are bullied, but it's also something that messes up those who bully.  Essentially it makes them little psychopaths in training...thus bullying is something that we are told to always be vigilant about. 

But I'm not so sure that we always handle it correctly.  Usually the general process is that adults are supposed to step in and stop these things.  We can't trust that kids will do this, we are told, and so the solution (and the responsibility) results on the shoulders of adults. 

I wonder, though, whether we are doing this right.  While adults need to stop bullying where it starts, I wonder if we also need to teach the kids who are bullied how to deal with this better.  Rather than just running to adults, are we teaching them to be proactive?  At some point they will not have adults around to fix their problems...so what are they doing to do about this now? 

Maybe the problem is that we don't know how to really teach kids.  Because there are bad kid-centered solutions: "Stop being a wimp so people won't bully you."  "Fight back if they hurt you."  "If they make fun of you, make fun of them 7 times worse."  "Just be an all-around jerk so nobody will want to mess with you."  Yeah, these are bad ideas. 

But we could make good ideas: A. Encourage them to not be thin-skinned.  Sometimes I wonder if we call everything bullying; at times on my bus I see a kid who gets upset because somebody doesn't want to talk with them; they're not being bullied, but we talk about it so much that THEY think they are.  B. Help them to see that the opinion of bullies is not really worth their time.  Why do bullies get all the attention?  If we showed them for what they were, maybe kids wouldn't think anything of them, but instead see them as sad people trying to get attention.  C. Genuinely promote the good things in life, and teach people to stop navel-gazing.  We so often focus on all the bad that happens that we do not take time to enjoy the good. 

I don't know...maybe the adults should step in and fix all this, since likely the adults of today were the bullied and bullies of their youth.  We should see it as it is.  But letting the kids fix this problem, giving them ownership, is a really important thing as well. 

Downsizing My Childhood

I called my dad yesterday to wish him a happy birthday, and after talking for a bit he told me that they had some news...they are selling their house and have already bought a new house.  Downsizing, they call it.  It's time, I suppose, as two and a half acres it too much for him to keep up with now; the new house has a tiny yard.  The house isn't that much smaller than their current house, but it's probably more compactly laid out and it's not so much out on the edge of town.  It's also not far from the college campus that my dad attended so many years ago, so he's probably happy about that. 

And I'm happy for them...I thought they would probably go to a residential community next, but they don't think they are ready for that and this is a good thing.  They have talked about this for awhile, and while I am shocked that it has happened so quickly, especially since they are not exactly change lovers, this is not the first house they had looked at and hopefully they can have a few happy years there. 

I'm still a bit reeling, however.  We moved to that house the summer before I started first grade, when I was not even six years old; they have lived there now almost 43 years.  I don't remember much of any house before that, and this is where I played and lived and called home for almost two decades.  It's where I was playing nerf basketball and landed on the sharp handle of my closet and cut my butt open.  It's where I hit golfballs out in the lot off of the big metal barn.  It's where my friends would gather so we could play some hoops out in the driveway.  And it's where I was loved by parents and siblings and had many happy days.  Even my son, who's a bit sentimental like me, is a bit sad..."Where are we gonna place flashlight tag with our cousins?" So yeah, it's gonna take time getting used to a new place when we go down and see them. 

Rationally, a house is just a thing, a piece of land with some construction and some decorations.  For most of my adulthood I have tried working hard at the concept of not storing up earthly treasures at the expense of what is more important. But when those earthly treasures finally go away, some of them still hold a large place in our hearts. 

My Kids

I love my children.  One is a teenager, one is a tween.  One struggles in school, one is bored by it because it is so easy.  One is athletic, the other is not.  One has a way of getting along with almost everybody, the other often finds conflict.

How is it that two children can come from the same parents and be raised almost exactly the same way and yet be so very different?  The more I raise my children, the more that I realize that so much of who they are may not be determined by what their mother and I hope that they will be.  There is a lot of them is based on various part of our genetic makeup.  There is another large part of them that comes because of the various people they run across.  And there are other large parts of them that come from who knows where. 

Occasionally I will hear stories about parents who raised six perfectly happy and respectful and brilliant children.  Maybe those parents have some kind of spectacular gift when it comes to raising children.  And then other times there are parents who work just as hard and each of their children turn out to be fully messed up.  And we wonder, were those parents really bad and we just didn't know it? 

Scripture tells us that 'Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.'  The older I get the more I realize that while this is a proverbial statement that is true most of the time, it's not true all of the time.  Good parents usually train up good children, and bad parents train up bad children.  As Luke 6:43-45 tells us, good fruit comes from good trees and bad fruit from bad trees.  But again, this is a proverbial truth, not an absolute one. 

I'd love it if there was a perfect formula for raising perfect children.  Maybe there is...that's why some people believe that genetically planning your children is what is best.  But sometimes kids are just kids.  Like the butterfly effect, some flapping wings on the other side of the planet may well cause a child to be a great athlete, or a drug dealer, or the scientist who cures cancer.  We just don't know...but we can love our children the best we can. 

Grumpy Old Guy #31

I'm driving a shuttle route last night and most of the kids are fine, but a little boy, about 6, keeps standing up and jumping around in the back.  Three times I have to get on the intercom, 'Sit Down!'  I don't like being that guy, but kids in the aisle or standing up, that's dangerous. 

So we get to the final drop-off point and as the boy is coming off I have him stand on top of the engine compartment and tell him that he has to do better sitting down, that he can't be jumping around on the bus.  We're a quarter of the way through the school year, he knows this by now but he doesn't care.  But then his brother, probably a year older and is waiting on him says, 'He can't sit down!  He has ADHD and that's why he acts like this.' 

To summarize: a seven-year-old is already making excuses for his younger brother as to why he is the way he is.  Where did he learn these things?  Most likely from his parents, who likewise make excuses for his unacceptable behavior.  This child is likely to through life with people making excuses for him, instead of simply saying 'No, you can't do this.' 

It's easy to bag on people I don't know well, but most kids really don't have ADHD.  Most of them are simply over-sugared, over-caffeinated, over-stimulated, and under-disciplined.  And when they act like this, everybody then looks for an excuse besides what's obvious.  No wonder I have a headache. 

The Adolescent President

It's been said many times before, but we have a 12-year old boy in the White House.  No, it's not Barron Trump (I think he still lives in New York with his mother).  It's the president, Donald Trump.  Watching him the last year or so has called to mind the Tom Hanks character in Big, a little boy who makes a wish for a big boy body and wakes up to find himself an adult.  For awhile, it's fun.  He gets to plays like a big boy until he finds out that it's not all that he thought it would be.  The only difference between Josh Baskin (the character in Big) and Trump is that a)Baskin eventually starts acting like an adult and b)then returns back to being a child again without all of his big-boy responsibilities.

How else can we explain a character like Trump?  Whether it is him bragging about getting a second scoop of ice cream (while everyone else gets one), or is never happier than while pretending to drive a semi, or harassing women by grabbing them by the p***y or walking in on them while they are getting dressed, or obsessing about how many people came to his party, he's a little boy who thinks that the world revolves around himself and throws tantrums when this doesn't seem to be the case.

Many liberals see Trump as a much more sinister, evil character, but after watching him for a year, I don't think he really is.  Compared to a character like Frank Underwood in House of Cards, who is simply about power and seems to have a Palpatine vibe, Trump is a lot more about the pretend world of what he imagines power and influence to be.  I'm not convinced after all this that he is smart or mature enough to get away with many of the things he is accused of doing.  That's why he so nakedly tried to tell James Comey to stop snooping around (and then screams out DID NOT! when he finds out this is illegal); that's why he can't keep a poker face and keeps tweeting whatever is on his mind (or whatever he saw on Faux News); that's why so little of what he wants (big walls!  tremendous growth!  the best people!) will eventually come to be (though, of course, the GOP/Tea Party in Congress seem to be getting everything they want).  He's just not capable of being the evil overlord that many fear him to be.

In the end, the strongest feeling I have for Trump is to feel really sorry for him, and I really do need to pray for him more.  All his life he's gotten away with doing what he wanted and faced very few consequences.  Nobody who has been as emotionally challenged as he is should be forced to do what he is doing.  There's a reason we don't let horny, immature, self-involved 12-year-old boys drive cars or make important decisions, let alone run the country.  For their own good, we patiently wait for them to grow up.  Too bad we didn't do this with Mr. Trump.

Why 'issues' like abortion are not always so easy...

I have started a new part-time job as a bus driver.  Actually I'm more like a van driver; what I do each morning is drive a SWEET 2011 Dodge Caravan out to two houses and pick up three kids who aren't really able to ride a school bus successfully.  I then take them to school where they are all minded by paraprofessionals throughout the day in their various classrooms, and then I pick them up after school and return them back to their homes.  Basically, I (and a few other drivers and the students' paras) are something like personal nannies, and of course we get paid for our time.  Each day the district (or the programs that fund these kinds of programs) likely spends at least a hundred dollars per student for each of these hard-case kids.  Some of them come from difficult homes, some are in foster care having been rescued from difficult homes, and some are just plain difficult.  Rather than kick them out of school, lots of money is poured into trying to help these at-risk kids.  These are our tax dollars at work.

So I was having a conversation recently with somebody who out of the blue brought up the problem of abortion and who wanted to direct my attention to recent attempts in Ohio to curtail abortion.  Generally speaking, I am against abortion, though I think that abortion is just a larger symptom of a greater problem, in that people do not want to take responsibility for their lives and so offing a fetus seems like the easiest option.  I would wish that every child could be born and that they could be loved and be raised right.  Sadly, however, millions of children are aborted each year.

But let's say for a moment that abortion was made illegal in this country.  There would be many illegal abortions, of course, and the danger to women's health would probably be a big issue.  But more likely ending abortion as we know it would also strongly increase the birth rate in our country.  Millions of children who at one time were unwanted (or perhaps had birth defects in the womb that led to the abortion) would now be born to parents who do not want them. What effect would that have?

Opponents of abortion would say that many of these children would live normal and healthy lives, given the opportunity.  Perhaps they are right...but I wonder how many of them would be unwanted, unhealthy, and now dumped onto a social infrastructure that is already over-taxed?  For instance, what would this do to pediatricians, who now have far too many patients to see already?  What would it do to our tax system, that already encourages people to make babies by all the tax credits and benefits one can get?  Would our deficit and debt balloon even more?  Would our schools have enough room?

And on a personal level, how many more special vans would we have to run out from our school district to transport all these difficult children who are now alive rather than aborted?  Are we ready for the population explosion that many good conservatives already resent by their refusal to vote for school bonds and other child-friendly structures?  Even now I hear people who grumble that the state and the schools do far too much to raise children...what do you think is going to happen when a million plus new unwanted children are tossed upon the social infrastructure each year?  Are they going to be at all happy about that?

As for me, I'm happy to be able to be a blessing for these children.  And I am thankful for the families that produce them, even if sometimes I wonder whether some people need to see that having more kids ain't a good thing.  But for those who want to end abortion, I wonder if they really see the ramifications of their hopes.  Because since many of them are financial as well as social conservatives, I wonder whether or not they are willing to pay for the needs of these children with as much vigor as they fought to keep them from being aborted?

Lament with a 10-year old.

I had a few people to go visit in this hospital on this Mother's Day, and my 10-year old daughter wanted to come with me, so I let her come.  She has been interested in riding with me on some of my pastoral visits lately.  I'm not entirely sure why...maybe she wants to spend time with me, or get away from her brother, or get out of the house on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  But when she comes with me, she goes into the rooms with me for prayer and visitation.

Today I visited two friends who are not well at all.  One was a man in ICU hooked up to who knows how many tubes and his arms were more bruised than white; he's likely not going to leave the hospital alive.  While I visited with the man's wife she kept coming into and out of the room; it was not a sight that most 10-year olds would understand.  On the way from there to the other hospital I told her about her mom and my's wishes that we never get to that point.  Someday we might be that ill, and she and her brother will have to make some life-or-death decisions, and I told her about my feeling this this is no way to die, that as Christians we have a greater hope in God and so what seems like pointless suffering is not something I want.  She did not say much, but I hope that she understood at least something of what I was trying to say.  Who knows, maybe someday she will be doing work like this and be a greater comfort to the families than I was today.

It grieves me terribly to deal with people I know and love like today; as I have been teaching a class on Biblical lament, recently I wrote a short one of my own.

For My Friends, April 2016

O Lord, who is worthy of praise, who has created us and put within us the very breath of life…

O Lord, why do my friends die so badly?  Why do so many people I care about suffer so much at the end of their lives?  God, I don’t understand how there can be years and years of hurt and anguish in which somebody doesn’t get better.  How do those of us who sing songs about heaven on Sunday live the rest of our lives acting as if holding onto this life is the most important thing? 

O Lord, make dying easier for us because we have faith in you.  Lord, make life something that is truly fulfilling for those who are in their old age.  Lord, make it where my friends are not drugged up, just surviving for the sake of ‘life’.  Lord, make us who call on your name truly live.

O Lord, creator and sustainer of every one of us who call on your name, let the world see that you truly desire to give us life and life to the fullest and so turn to you.  Let doctors and nurses praise you because they can only see your miraculous hand working to give people life.  Let us all depend on you rather than medication or invasive surgery or the things we think are so important. 

O Lord, I know that you are God, even when I can’t always understand why things are the way they are.  May I continue to praise you in good times in bad, in times of happiness and frustration.  You are the giver of all that is good. 

My Son, the Existentialist

My son will turn 8 this weekend.  He's a good kid; a generation or two ago he would have been called 'well-adjusted'.  He's popular with his friends, behaves appropriately but at times is prone to bouts of silliness, gives it a try in sports, is excited about church, and does well in school.

Lately, though, he's had fits of crying and sadness, often minutes after going to bed but also at other times of the day.  Most kids in that situation have just awoken from bad dreams, or they remember a bad incident that happened at school.  But not Jacob.  Jacob is sad because he is growing older.  He recalls the joy of being a childhood and doesn't want to leave that behind.  For him, childhood has meant bike rides with dad, playing with friends, snuggling with mom, trips to the ocean and Disneyland, and a church family that loves him.  And that, he says, is what he doesn't want to give up.

I suppose I've never been like that, or at least that I can recall.  I've always responded to the 'next stage' of life as as a given.  You get older and that means you start to drive, you go off to college, you start working, you get married, you have kids.  I turned 45 a few months ago and don't think obsessively about it.  I get nervous about the future at times, but have never lost my mind over such things.  I've never worried that I am getting old.  What I thought might seem old many years ago simply IS.  A few more aches and pains and pounds, a few more responsibilities, a little bit more wisdom (I hope).  But I've never spent much time dwelling on getting older any more than trying to look back and be thankful for past and hopeful for the present.

My son, though, is a different animal.  He's always been much more deliberate about the world in front of him.  He 'sees' in a way that is different.  And no, I'm not going down this road of 'MY CHILD IS A GENIUS' because I know that's not the case, because at times common sense and he do not appear to be friends, and because his idea of a good joke still seems to be sitting on my lap and farting and then laughing uproariously.

And so I wonder how to deal with this.  I'm not sure it's enough for us to say that it's great to get older, that he has so much to look forward to.  For him memories are much more real tangible than the future.  I can talk all I want about how he'll have more great things happen or how age isn't just a number, but maybe I need to just be quiet and let him weep a little bit for his childhood.  8 seems early for that, but maybe it's good for him to already be learning some introspection.

"Hi, God!"

The other night our family was eating out on the back porch, and we could tell that off to the west a storm was brewing up and headed our way.  Our 6-year old son finished his meal about the time we heard the first thunder.  "What's that?"  We knew that he knew it was thunder, but I said, "It's God clapping for you."  He thought about it for a second, and then looked up into the sky.  "Hi, God!"  And for the next five minutes he carried on a conversation with God.  He showed off his beaded necklace (don't ask) that he had gotten for a scavenger hunt, danced around the yard, and occasionally would talk to the sky.

It was a beautiful thing to watch.

And he took a child and put him in the midst of them, and taking him in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me." (Mark 9:36-37 ESV)

Max and Ruby, a background study

Ruby (age 10) and her younger brother Max (age 4) live alone in a well-kept house in a small village.  They appear to have no family except for their maternal grandmother, a sweet elderly woman widowed four years previously.  Ruby and Max seem to have an acceptable level of social life with their peers; Ruby engages in girl scouts-like organization and regularly has friends over to play; Max likewise occasionally has friends with which to play.  Ruby appears to be the one who is the caregiver for Max, regularly bathing him, dressing him, and feeding him.

Their living arrangement brings about several questions:
-Why is Ruby seeming to be the sole caregiver for Max?
-If there are no parents around, why do the children not live with their grandmother?
-Why are they not allowed to attend school?
-What will happen to these children?

The situation of Max and Ruby appears to stem from a tragic event in the months before we first watch their story.  Max and Ruby came from a generally stable household with loving parents...until one day when the parents disappeared.  What happened to them?

I suggest that Ruby somehow was responsible for the deaths of her parents.  Perhaps they perished in a car crash when she distracted them with a tantrum.  Perhaps they died when she accidentally mixed some bathroom chemicals into a cake she made for them.  Or perhaps they tripped over and broke their necks when they encountered the legion of Ruby's stuffed animals in the living room.

Ruby might have been responsible, but she was not guilty.  Her actions greatly divided the family.  The paternal grandparents were upset with what happened and refused to forgive Ruby, and by extension Max, for their son's death.  They refuse to have any contact with the children.  The maternal grandmother, however, loves the children deeply and has chosen to forgive.  While in her elderly state (and perhaps displaying the first signs of dementia) she does not have the ability anymore to raise the children herself, she continues on with the traditional grandmother role of looking in on them and spoiling them when she can before sending them to their own home.

But why does society refuse to provide proper adult supervision for these children?  In their particular rabbit community, children who are orphaned, particularly those who caused the death of their children, are not provided foster parents.  Rather, the children are left to fend for themselves without the benefit of a proper education.  The children may be blessed to have a few neighbors courageous enough to allow their children to play with Ruby, who has generally been ostracized for the death of her parents, but these are the exceptions.  Ultimately, their lives within this rabbit culture are not honored as humans are, for rabbits reproduce far too quickly to sustain a stable population count.  Rabbit children, particularly orphaned children who had a role in the deaths of their parents, are considered disposable by society as a whole, and if a few die due to neglect, others will soon replace them.  They breed like rabbits, after all.  

Ruby, however, is still reeling from the loss of her parents and feels especially guilty for their deaths.  She has vowed to her rabbit-god that she will care for her brother until he reaches adulthood.  Thus she cooks and cleans and tends to his every need, even as she lives off the trust fund that her deceased parents left in their care.  She may have the body of a 10-year old, but the scars of her youth have already made her into a middle-aged woman emotionally.  Certainly her friends come around occasionally to give her some youthful company, but Ruby will never marry, never find love, and die at a relatively young age due to the stresses of her youth.

Max, having lost his parents at a very young age, will grow up into a young man with many emotional issues.  His sister will have done well to have raised him to this age, but having not the parental support he needed he will continually see women as objects for displaced affection.  He will go through a series of short-term relationships, often producing bastard rabbit offspring, but rarely will have any contact with his children.  His sister Ruby will seek to be a good aunt to these children, but again, being rabbits, there are too many of them to count.

Max and Ruby is a tragic story whose difficulties have only begun when we first begin to view their story.

Behind the 8 Ball

My daughter turned 8 recently.  It's a fascinating age.  Tonight at dinner much of the discussion centered on Santa Claus.  How will he get into our house, as we don't have a chimney?  Well, he can get in through the fairy door in the kitchen (which has a matching door out on the tree in the front yard).  It's a tiny little door, so how might that work?  Well, he's magical and he can shrink things to get through, just like he is immune to the fire when he goes through the chimneys.  It's an age of questions and pondering and the like.  Santa is already a question mark, but in a way he's still a possibility as well.  I love the innocence and the seeking of 8.

But of course 8 has its darkness as well.  She has never really been an 'easy' child to raise like my son.  From the time when we brought her home from the hospital, when she simply never wanted to sleep alone, until even the present day, when she still has her nightmares and still wakes us up at night, she's always had her insecurities.  She rages once in awhile at us, and I know that she's the cause of my grey hair.  We sometimes dread the coming teenage years.

One of the things we have been really watching lately is how she interacts with her peers at school.  When it comes to younger kids she loves to play the mother hen...get her a bunch of kindergarten kids who need bossing, and she's there.  But around her peers?  The little girl who has never liked being alone doesn't mind so much sitting alone or playing by herself at recess.

On the one hand this concerns me, because as a parent I want my kid to achieve and succeed socially.  Who wants to raise an outcast?  Sometimes I worry she isn't 'ascending' into second grade social stratospheres (yes, the class structure is already starting to develop at such a young age).  Part of it may be that even as we have lived in this town since she was born we'll always be considered outsiders on some level.  That's just small town life for you...stay a generation or four, and you'll be fully accepted.  But part of it may be that she sometimes isn't quite as mature as some of the other kids.  She's rather dance around like nobody's watching.  She still very much has that little kid imagination when probably a lot of her friends have already decided against Santa.

But on the other hand I'm proud of her.  In her younger days she would have raged and cried about not having everybody rotate around her.  Now, though?  She's basically fine with it.  What this seems to tell me is that she doesn't think she has to be a follower of what everybody else does.  Girls of the second grade are starting to learn that meanness that will become something of their trademark for the next twenty years of their lives.  They'll exclude and bully and gossip about girls who don't live as the gang leader says they ought to live.  Childhood, especially for girls, can be cruel.  But I'm grateful that my daughter may well be learning to live above the fray.  While the other girls are off in their groups gossiping and plotting, she's playing on the jungle gym and singing a song to herself.

We tell ourselves as Christians all the time not be followers of the world's ways.  Perhaps, just perhaps, this lesson is being learned by my daughter.