Friday thoughts <3
Happy St. Patricks Day!
I know you all enjoyed Andy’s post yesterday and thank you for all the love and support you showed this budding (I hope) author. Also I know we all cringed (not only for Andy but for our own brackets) when Illinois and Arizona …. I can’t even say the word.
Okay – on with today’s thought which actually kind of fits in with the winning and losing of this March Madness.
I had lunch with a younger than me friend this week and we talked about a whole lot of things. She has children about the age of our grands, but we have so much in common it is always refreshing to visit and catch up.
Since she is a reader like me, I told her I was discovering for the first time the children’s book “The Secret Garden”. I told her the opening chapters are so sad…the main character is a little girl who is unloved by her mother, ignored by her father and raised in India in wealth and by the care of servants.
She is neither loved nor loving and when cholera strikes the household and kills all but those who flee, she is left alone and forgotten. Because she is isolated, she is spared the sickness and is finally discovered by some officials who work out the details of getting her transported to a distant relative who lives in a desolate house on the edge of the moor in England.
So far it is about as harsh a story as I could dream up on my worst gloomy day and I keep thinking…THIS is a children’s book? I know because it is so well loved that there will be transformation and redemption but mercy…this is rough stuff to read.
When I shared my thoughts with my friend, she smiled and nodded her head and said how much I was going to love it and yes….it starts out so hard but is a wonderful book.
We had also discussed other things that kids and parents are facing these days and how difficult it is to maintain innocence and yet allow the appropriate timing for maturing and refining for our little ones.
I said to her that in our culture the story line of an unloved, unwanted child who is disagreeable and selfish is something we would perhaps consider too much for one of our children to hear as a story and yet we know that movies and television are filled with ridiculous amounts of violence and horror that is considered “entertainment”.
I asked her what it is that makes me think the very sad story of this orphan girl is something that children shouldn’t hear and she said the wisest thing.
“Because we want to protect our children from adversity.”
Oh my.
How true.
Entertainment, no matter how gory and nightmare producing it may be, is escape…but just don’t let our children face real life adversity.
And it isn’t just children.
It would seem our culture leans toward wanting to be protected and insulated from actual trials that can happen while being entertained and even frightened by things that most likely won’t.
I am taking a good hard look at my own tactics for sheltering from any kind of struggle or hard thing that I don’t want to hear or deal with.
Jesus told us…in this world we will have troubles, but take heart…He has overcome the world. He has overcome the adversities that we have to walk through and He is with us in them.
But we will walk through them.
And when we do, instead of seeking the distraction of things that will entertain or numb us to them, it is important to face them knowing we are not alone and that as we pass through the hardest of times, we are being shaped and refined and loved by our Lord who overcame them all <3
When you go through deep waters, I will be with you.
When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown.
When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up;
the flames will not consume you.
Isaiah 43:2