Facing the ugly
Yesterday a comment made by my son caught me mid-kitchen.
“I just want something happy. There is too much sad stuff happening these days.”
Plate in hand, water dripping, floor unswept, I paused before responding because I knew this wasn’t a glib throwaway moment. You see, my son had a point – there is too much sad stuff happening. In our family we have chosen not to closet our kids from the tough things of the world. We took them overseas to live in in a country experiencing civil war for 5 of their earliest years. We now attempt to live missionally in a suburb others would deliberately avoid. When it came time to grow from four to five we chose to foster and have never hidden or sweetened the reasons behind children requiring this sort of care.
And then lately several stories close to our immediate circle have been shaken by pain and grief and concern. It is a sad and at times ugly world we live in. Suffering surrounds us, whether we block it out or speak about it around the dinner table. But there is also a longing for peace and healing and, yes, ‘something happy’. I think this is the way God wired us.
In that mid-kitchen moment, reading the concern on my son’s face, the thought flashed through my mind that perhaps we shouldn’t be so open with our kids. That maybe there should be a daily ration of ‘sad things’. And maybe in an ideal world this would be a possibility. But in reality we can’t hold checkpoints for what happens in life and I’d prefer my kids equipped to know how to deal with the ugly rather than learning how to avoid confrontation with their hearts.
So I put the plate down, ignored the floor a bit longer and grabbed my son into a hug, my chin on his head – something I know I won’t be able to do for much longer. Then I mumbled something about how right he was about the sad things, but that God was still good and we could still find the happy things, and we must still find the happy things.
And then we were barged in on by our youngest who came sprinting across the dust and crowded in for his portion of the embrace. Something happy had certainly found us.
Penny Reeve’s most recent children’s novel More Than A Mouse explores themes of trusting God for the good, even when circumstances appear to be proclaiming the opposite. For more information visit www.pennyreeve.com