Eyes to See

Don’t you love how kids can just wander in from the backyard or their playroom or wherever and drop these huge questions on you? I mean one minute they are pretending that Batman has teamed up with a dinosaur to take out the evil giant Lalaloopsy queen and the next moment they suddenly appear by your side asking why their friend’s mommy and daddy don’t live together, or why people die, or why some people don’t have enough food to eat or why the Vikings haven’t ever won the Super Bowl. And sometimes we’re ready for these questions. Sometimes we see the opportunity at hand and we meet our children where they are and we ask them questions too and we talk about what is really going on inside those beautiful little minds and hearts.  

But sometimes we’re not ready and we stumble our way through incoherent “answers” that probably leave our little ones wondering how they could have ever risked leaving Batman alone with that scary giant for so long. And then there are those times when we are really not ready--times when although we know the ideas and values that we would like to nurture in our children, we’ve lost sight of them ourselves and we just don’t know what to say. And sometimes, if we’re listening, that is when our children take an unexpected moment in an average day and bust into our world to teach us a thing or two about life and what is actually important...

So our five-year-old son recently barged in on me while I was shaving. He looked up at me, eyes shining, and out of the absolute blue asked, “Daddy, are we rich?” I was not in a good place for this question, but by some act of pure grace, I paused before answering. I even paused before the inner laughter I felt showed itself in any way. I mean, I might have truly laughed in his face. I might have smiled down at my son (condescendingly) and attempted to explain the idea of the middle-class to a five-year-old. I might have pointed out that if Mommy and Daddy were rich we would have a much bigger house. I might have chuckled and made a crack about how we wouldn’t have bought the used pop-up camper but a brand new one. I might have smiled and gently explained how most rich people don’t have to worry about health insurance or how they will ever afford to pay for a decent college education for their children or their next vehicle, or… or… or…  

I might have said all of these things with where my head had been in the preceding hours, days, and even weeks—but luckily I didn’t. Luckily I just stood there dumbfounded long enough to let my son answer his own question. And without me even having the wherewithal to turn the question back to him, our little man somehow gave me the answer that I needed to hear that day. He smiled up at me, suddenly very sure of the answer, and practically shouted, “I think we are rich, Dad! We have a nice house to live in. We have cars to take us to our friends’ houses, and we even have a boat and a camper! Think of all the fun stuff we get to do together.” And with that he spun around and returned to wherever it is that little boys go while I stood there stunned, looking in the mirror, and suddenly awake to the many, many rich blessings in my life—not the least of which is a five-year-old with the eyes to see what I so often take for granted.

Photography: Boy playing photo by Daniel Lobo. Boy's eyes cropped from a photo by latteda.

Images used under authority of Creative Commons 2.0 license.