Some of you are probably tired of retellings of conversations with putatively precocious toddlers that are supposed to elicit some great insight or something. If so, I apologize in advance. But last night my 2.5 year old son stumped me pretty well.
\n
\nAt the close of our bed-time prayer, he asked (parroting back our earliest gospel instruction), “Is prayer how we talk to God?”
\n“Yes, that’s right” I proudly replied.
\n“Where is God?”
\n“In heaven.”
\n“Where is Heaven? Is it a house?”
\n“Heaven is, umm, err, far far away…maybe up in the sky somewhere.”
\n“Can we go there with a helicopter?”
\n“I don’t think so.”
\n“Can we see it with binoculors?”
\n“I don’t think so.”
\n“Maybe we should try.”<\/p>\n
That was the end of the discussion, but I instantly began a internal self-critique of my supposed spiritual guidance. Is it accurate to say heaven is far away? More importantly, it is pragmatically justifiable to tell a child that God is in a place far away? Is it harmless to use inaccurate, but readily accessible metaphors in teaching about God (i.e., he lives up in the clouds with angels)? And just how do you talk about God and Heaven to someone who does not have much of an ability to think about real things he cannot see or touch?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some of you are probably tired of retellings of conversations with putatively precocious toddlers that are supposed to elicit some great insight or something. If so, I apologize in advance. But last night my 2.5 year old son stumped me pretty well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}