…come traipsing down the stairs with about a cup of hand lotion plastered all over your hands and arms and pajamas and say “Mommy, I have some soap on me.” And then, when I go upstairs to find MORE hand lotion all over the walls, the stair rail, my bed-side table, the door knobs, and the bottle of lotion, say “But it was just an accident. Accidents happen, you know.”
The other day, I was playing the Game of Life with the girls. It’s a board game where you have a little car that you drive along this path through the various stages of Life. (Don’t get me going on how restrictive the stages of Life are – there is, for example, no option for getting married, or for buying a house. AND the only “success” at the end of Life is if you’ve amassed a whole whack of money. But it’s just a game, so is it all that important? I dunno. But I digress…)
When you get married, you have to place either a blue or pink tiny plastic figure next to your own tiny plastic figure in the car. For some reason (probably because it’s rather tittilating and she can giggle about it), Nikki likes to be a “lesbian” with 2 pink figures in the car. I don’t make a big deal about it – I just suggest she refrain from doing it if Grandma is playing with her.
Well, this time, she had second thoughts about it. She hesitated, and, because I know her so well, I was sure there was something behind her hesitation. Sure enough… part way through the game came “The Question” (there are ALWAYS questions where this girl is concerned). “Mom, is it WRONG to be a lesbian?”
Well, is it? Hmmm… I’m not sure I had a satisfactory answer for her. I mumbled something about how alot of people feel it goes against God’s will, blah, blah, blah. Thankfully, she didn’t push it beyond that. But have no doubt, the question will come back again. And next time it will be tougher.
I don’t know if I’m ready for this level of questions. Having a daughter who’s now a pre-teen, and has always thought way beyond her years is going to challenge me to come up with answers that satisfy her. For alot of this stuff, I haven’t even found satisfactory answers for MYSELF, so how can I offer them to her? I guess it will mean I just have to be honest – that there are alot of things I haven’t figured out yet. But she needs clearer boundaries than I do. Especially at this age. And she can be pretty persistent when she NEEDS to figure out where those boundaries are.
Sometimes (just sometimes) I think parenting would be easier if I were more like my mother. In her world, there is so much more black and white and there are EASY answers for these questions. My world doesn’t work like hers though. It seems like the older I get, the more shades of gray there are. I’m getting used to it, but it doesn’t always make for easy parenting. And, considering the fact that I’ve had a few good friends in my life who ARE lesbians, I just can’t write them off the way my mother can.
I told Nikki last night that I thought she’d make a good journalist. She asks ALOT of good questions. But she says she’d rather be a politician. She wants to be President. When I told her she can’t, because she’s Canadian, she was bummed out. But I think she’ll settle for Prime Minister. Is there an official name for “mother of the Prime Minister”? And do I get to live in a fancy house? Maybe I can get one of those patronage appointments as an ambassador to an exotic country…
Another sign of spring – the lambs have been born! Now that Grandpa’s gone and so are his sheep, we had to visit the fair to find this one.
Sometimes I wish I had a truth-metre – some contraption that worked like a smoke detector and beeped every time truth was in the air. I want to know truth, but I’m not always sure I’m good enough at recognizing it. Sometimes, as I grow into myself, I come to the conclusion that something that I once believed was truth is really an untruth disguised.
I’ve been challenged with this ever since that faith-shaking moment in front of that wall of books. So many of those books seemed like disguises simply muddying the truth instead of clarifying it.
We’re all trying to figure it out. I’m not alone. All those people who’ve written diatribes and commentaries and lengthy theology textbooks – they’re no different from me. Some of them THINK they have truth-metres, but no one has a corner on truth. Not even the pope had it ALL right (of course I mean no disrespect for the dead). We all see through a “mirror dimly”.
These thoughts have been with me as I worked my way through Generous Orthodoxy. I LOVE this book, and so much of it resonates with me. I want to say “YES! YES! YES!” I want to believe THIS is truth. But can I be sure?
I used this quote when I spoke in church on Sunday… “I must add, though, that I don’t believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many (not all!) circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu or Jewish contexts.” I knew it was provocative, but I felt I had to say what was in my heart. If anything, my experience in Africa convinced me that spreading God’s kingdom is not necessarily about converting people to OUR version of the truth, but letting God’s truth find its way into THEIR version of it. There are, after all, so many things that they seem to understand better than us – how to live in community, how to demonstrate compassion and friendship.
Well, it seems I picked just the passage that has gotten Brian McLaren (the author) into all kinds of trouble (it happened last month, but I just stumbled on it AFTER I used the quote). Apparently the Kentucky Baptist Convention withdrew its invitation to Brian McLaren to speak at its Evangelism Conference because they didn’t like that particular section of the book.
So, I can’t help but wonder – what IS the truth? I’m still convinced that McLaren is onto something, but obviously the southern Baptists think their truth-metre is working just fine and his is faulty.
And all the while, I can’t help but wonder if God is shaking his head and wondering why his people can’t figure out how to get along and just get on with building his kingdom. What gives me hope is that that’s just what McLaren is proposing – that we find some way of setting aside all the trappings of religion and work together. He contends that following Jesus means rising ABOVE what we have defined as Christianity in our own contexts.
According to the media reports, McLaren was quite gracious about the whole thing. I’m SO glad, because THAT’S the way I think Jesus would have asked him to react. He lived out Matthew 10:14… “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town.”
Until God finds some way of convincing me otherwise, my faulty truth-metre still continues to point in the same direction McLaren’s points in.
At our house, springtime means SLURPEE-TIME!
Julie, my word girl who learned to talk almost as soon as she could breathe, and who didn’t really learn to read so much as absorb it, is currently into backwards words. On a frequent basis, she’ll tell me what a random word is backwards. And now she’s starting in on “palindromes”, those words or phrases that are the same backwards as forwards. Anyone want to help us think of some? Here are some of hers… Hannah, Bob, mom, dad, level, pop… (and then when you’ve caught the bug, you can check out www.palindromelist.com to see the longest palindrome EVER!)