Trying to teach on death

Well this is a treat, Travis wrote this post after one of his interactions with our children, enjoy he is a great writer:

One thing we love to do with our kids is to push and pull through some of the phenomenally exciting stories of the OT.  For the ages of our brood, a hefty dose of Bible stories does much to ground them in the basics of theology and life.  I had never thought much, however, about how few times these stories reveal the Christian view of death in a fashion a youngster can understand.  Oh, there are abundant stories containing death (David's beheading of Goliath is a favorite of the Williams men) but few that I have used to rightly shape the minds of my children's concept of what happens when people die.  This is of course not the fault of the Scriptures, but instead one of many flaws in my attempts at fathering "through" the Bible.

My ineptitude in this area knocked me down like a six-foot Sarasota summer of 2010 storm wave recently when I was discussing with my kids the illness of their Great-Grandma and the possibility of her death(which I hope doesn't happen for another 20 years, shortly after Grandma Pinnie turns 109) .  Conversation proceeded as follows:

Me- "Grandma is very sick and we need to consider the possibility that she could die, though God may heal her yet."

Micah(my most morbid child)- "Dead like the other man we saw?"- referring to the viewing-of-friends of my good friend Tim's dad who recently went to see Jesus.

Me- "Yes.  Her body will be left behind but she will really go to Jesus"

Isaiah- "I don't get that."  Why should you, I thought.  I'm bombing this explanation!

Me-"Well, just part of her will go to God now and her body will meet God later.  The part that goes now will be her thoughts, and the part of her that makes her like ice cream and be happy when she sees you.  There's a lot to Grandma Pinnie you can't see."  I'm not sure that helped-waters still seem muddy- popsicle fleeted faces still knotted with heads tilted slightly.

Micah- "So the body we see is not real?" He sort of squalls this.

Me-"Her body is real but there is another real part you can't see.  Like your sadness and your hope that Mama will eat supper with us tonight."

Isaiah- "Oh, I think I see.  Grandma is kinda like that bad-guy from Superman (see Superman the Animated Series S1 E7 entitled, "The Way of All Flesh". The title is actually a reference to Joshua 23:14, where Joshua kinda gives his death speech).  The one that ripped off his human flesh and he really had a robot underneath.  The robot is who he really was."

At this point several thoughts circled my consciousness concentrically as hammer sharks.  First, that's not a bad illustration, for a second graders' mind.  Nice work boy! The teachers at that school we pay for you to go to must be fantablo! Second, I'm not sure Grandma would enjoy that comparison half as much as me.  Third, I would be a mad teacher/father if I had planned this as a twisted sort of Socratic irony- that is learning the Bible from Superman(whose writers I presume did not intend the cyborg villain Metallo to teach anything about the dual nature of man).

The discussion ended with my children still a tad short of a complete understanding of the doctrine of man and death(not unlike their Papa's understanding).  However, I did resolve to be more thoughtfully intentional in my Bible story readings with my kids.  Maybe pause a moment to insert a little more theology while David is slaying his 10 thousands.

Pictures from trip-more memories made!

Well I wasn't able to download these pictures until I got back home, so yes I made it back to NC.  Travis and the kids left on Saturday(18th) to come back and I stayed on to be with grandma at the hospital and finish all the packing.  Did I say she lived in this house for 53 years, if you are a pack rat like she is then you can accumulate ALOT of stuff in that amount of time.  So it was a fun experience.  A side story, I had just finished boxing up about 20 boxes or so of sea shells, did I also mention that grandma has a lot of collections, anyway I texted Aunt Beth and Herschel and said jokingly the Ft. Pierce beach was calling saying they had a decrease in their sea shell population did we know anything about it, ha right.  Then my dad calls me from work to say, oh I forgot to mention in the white cabinet behind the door there are more seashells, had to laugh even more...I will say it was fun packing up her stuff, hard, dirty, hot, tiring, backwrenching, ....etc.  but still neat to see more of grandma through her stuff.  So here are some pictures from our time there, another thing about the closure of this trip was that my kids and Travis also got to make new memories that hopefully they will remember as they get older.  So enjoy the pictures!  And keep praying for Grandma she is now 3 weeks in the hospital, in and out of ICU, trouble breathing, not eating well and still trying to figure out this bad virus. 

Grandma taught Travis and I how to cut fish heads off, scale and clean them. Travis was able to teach Isaiah.

More Memories

I hope to post some pictures of our current trip, when I can figure out how to download to grandma's computer, so for now here are some more memories. 

**Asking grandma when we went to town to drive over tickle hill.  This was a steep hill in town that if you ride over fast it tickles your tummy of course.  We would always ask her if we could go over it, so tonight we took our kids over it.  I asked Travis if I could drive home from Sonny's(yum!) Barbeque to show them a surprise.  So of course Travis starts kind of freaking out when I start speeding up to go over a random hill in downtown, so then all the kids laugh and love it.  So I remember the old memories and make a new one with our kids tonight as well. (I have been told that they did pave it some, so its not as steep as it used to be.)

**Going fishing at the Savannah's...Herschel cast back and got a hook caught in his back, grandma very calmly stuffes his loud cussing mouth with donuts and proceeds to cut the hook out with a knife she had on hand...I know it had to hurt.  I think we kept fishing after that.

All for now, more to come!

A Chapter of Life comes to a close

This is a picture of 905 Jackson Way, Ft. Pierce, FL the home of my grandma Pinnie for 53 years.  This week I will be posting some memories of times here, in order to reflect on all the good memories had in this house and on this street and on these beaches.  Grandma is having to sell her house for some sad, unforeseen and undesired things, but since this has to happen and this is how life is, we press on thinking of all the good times that have been had here.  We are in Florida right now to help with this process while Grandma is in the hospital battling a virus and pneoumonia. 

So at the end of every trip we would stand outside the tall palm by the door and take a family picture, one day I'll dig them up and scan them and show you the progression of our looks.  We have been coming to grandma's since we were too young to remember, but here are a couple of memories for today to remind our family that life is about making memories, looking onward to what lies ahead and remembering that all of the things on this earth will one day perish and all that matters is in eternity.

Memories:
**Catching fish off the seawall while sitting in fishing chairs, drinking sweet tea, and then grandma cutting and cleaning them and then frying them up to eat for dinner with the best hushpuppies you ever had!
**Walking down the road to the beach, forgetting:)  to put on sunscreen and coming home burnt and to a lot
of trouble.
**Asking grandma to call Uncle Red so we could go swimming in his pool (the pool where we all learned how to swim in).
All for today, hopefully more to come!

What do a toothbrush and toilet roll holder have in common?

Well you guessed it!  These are things that Sammy thought would be fun to throw in the toilet and then flush them.  I felt like he had thrown something in our upstairs toilet one day, but I caught him afterwards and didn't know what it was.  Of course shortly after our toilet started not flushing well.  Then shortly after that our downstairs one had the same problem.  So Travis went to work, he tried all the usual things to clean a toilet and then went to the hardware store a couple times and ended up taking both toilets off the base and outside to snake and figure out what was going on...so he found a toothbrush lodged in one and the middle part that holds the toilet paper on the holder in the other, so the problem...Sammy likes
to throw things in the toilet.  The solution is now Sammy is banned from all bathrooms until he is potty trained, we were just considering starting soon so not sure if we will rethink this or not.  So the others are instructed to yell and stop Sammy from entering any bathroom.  But I will say it was a blessing we didn't have to call a plumber!  Oh the adventures of a two year old, keeps us on our toes:)