It is one week until my daughter's wedding. I am full of nervous energy and checklists and making sure the one day goes right, or at least as right a possible. I have avoided any talk of how much things are about to change, but watching her slowly move out of her room in preparation has forced my hand. So, I am trying a little creative avoidance in the form of blogging an insight that hit me fairly hard yesterday.
Nix was packing away her bookshelves, and brought a stack to me of all the books that were required reading in high school. She knew that JD might be required to read them, so it would be nice to have easy access to them. As I looked over titles like Slaughterhouse Five and Street Car Named Desire I realized that we require a lot of our kids in school. Within this stack there are a lot of complex emotions and life concepts that I probably wouldn't have introduced on my own or wouldn't have known how to. That has its pros and cons. From there I flashed to the books that I did bring into her life. We took her to Narnia and Middle Earth, taught her the best ways to hitchhike through the galaxy, and showed her what is on the other side of the looking glass. Then there is the most complex and important book of either stack, the Bible.
All too often, we look at the happy fluffy parts of the Bible with our kids, and never dig into the deep parts. In the early years it is all about Noah's rainbow and fishing with the disciples. As they grow older, we tend towards teaching them behavioral concepts. We talk to them about being trustworthy, loyal, helpful, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. We don't talk to them about the guy that was eaten by worms or that time David's child died as punishment for having slept with another man's wife and then had the guy set up to die. We talk about Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt for looking back with longing over the sinful world they were leaving behind. We don't talk about Lot's daughter's getting him drunk and having sex with him so they could get pregnant. No, that's an ugly story with complex ideas that we don't think our kids could grasp. So, Shakespeare and Tolkien, but not Leviticus? Then we are going to throw them out into the world to encounter atheists, or worse, cults? Do you know what part of the Bible atheists love to quote? I'll give you a hint, it isn't out of Roman's. If all you have taught your kid from the Bible is that God is love, but not the full weight of what that means, or "Judge not", and not the concept of discernment, you are setting them up for failure of the worst kind.
I guess what I am saying is that we can not sugar coat and dumb down the Bible because "they are just kids" but then expect them to give a detailed analysis of The Catcher in the Rye. Either they can handle it or they can't. You can not keep giving kids only half of the story. Besides, finding out the Bible probably should come with a parental guidance tag and MA rating would probably get their attention.
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