Thankfully my son is too young to understand what happened yesterday in Connecticut. Thankfully he won't be haunted by bad dreams and he won't be clinging to me with fear when we drop him off for Nursery at church tomorrow. However, this moment in time gives me a chance, as his mom, to practice what I would say to him as he gets older when this kind of thing happens again (because we all know what happens when you take God out schools and madmen get hold of a gun and no legal citizen is allowed to take a gun into a school to protect the kids...this could turn into a different kind of post and I don't want to make political statements here).
Last night, while my husband was at the Hobbit with his dad, I explained a few things to my son. I told him that evil people do evil things. Sometimes God can't stop evil people from doing evil things because we all have a choice to make about our actions. If someone chooses evil and turns away from doing what God says, well then he makes a choice like this one and innocent people sometimes pay the price for it.
I told him that God is good and God loves him. I told him that Christmas is when Jesus was born and we need to remember that God came to earth as a baby to bring us back to Him. I told him that even though these 27 people died in a bad way that God would help us find something good to take out of it and that if we were sad, God would comfort us if we asked Him to. I also told him that his mommy and daddy would do everything they could to keep him safe, that his aunts and uncles and grandparents would keep him safe too. I told him that the people at church wouldn't let someone else hurt him while he was there with them and that Uncle Tony would stop someone from hurting him with a gun. (Again, this could get political, but I live in Iowa and we have conceal carry laws here. If you don't like that, refer back to the Constitution and the Second Amendment.)
After this little one sided conversation, 2.0 went back to his Duplos and started throwing them around the living room, trying to build things with a combination of Mega Blocks and Duplos without realizing the two don't mix. He didn't have nightmares last night and he was a happy-go-lucky little boy today with his Meemaw. I get to hug him and cuddle him and play with him while there are families who aren't that lucky today.
Someday he's going to participate in this kind of conversation. I wish I hadn't had to practice it with him last night.
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