Return to Innocence

I miss my blog and it hasn't even been that long.

I began my summer internship, and because it is also accompanied by a rigorous academic program, I will be extraordinarily busy until mid-August. So, forgive me when I go days without posting. I have to travel three more times this month alone, just to give you an idea of why I might not be blogging (although when I get my laptop fixed, look out!).

Anyway, I had an interesting conversation with Kid Sister before bed last night. Mother taught the kids how to pray and now they do it every night. Mostly for "Daddy to get better." Last night, however, Kid Sister started asking me all kinds of questions about God. It made me quite uneasy. Here are a few of the things she said:

What does God look like?

God doesn't hear my prayers because He's not here.

I wish I could fly so I could go up into the clouds and see God.

I think most people have had these things cross their minds at some point. I didn't know how to answer her, though. I know what the "right answers" are, the ones that Mother and Father would have given her had she spoken to them. But she didn't speak to them. She spoke to me. The perfect person! I am always tempted to take the easy way out and give her the typical Christian answers, but I don't feel that would be fair to her. If I tell her that stuff at this young age, she'll take it as fact. When she grows up, she'll be just as screwed up as I am (or moreso). She'll probably resent me for lying to her (or at least for claiming things were true that I had no proof of).

You know, none of us believed in Santa Claus growing up. My parents felt that if they told us that Santa was real and we grew up and discovered that it was a lie, that we would logically conclude that everything they told us about God was a lie, too. It didn't bother me while I was growing up. I actually had a lot of fun telling other kids that Santa wasn't real and that it was their parents who bought the gifts. (I wasn't trying to be a bitch, I was just trying to enlighten. Mother recently told me that I was never guilty of outright disobedience as a child. I simply articulated all the reasons why she was wrong. *Shrugs shoulders*)

So how do you raise well-rounded, spiritual children? I read an MSN article on the subject once. It said things like, "Give them all the options and when they get a little older, tell them what you believe but emphasize that it's only a belief." Yeah, right. People are going to do that? Maybe they should but they won't. The stakes are too high for most people. If you think your child will go to hell by becoming a Buddhist, you're not going to say, "I believe Jesus is the way, but hey, you know, to each his own."