Story of Easter and open minds

Sunday night we ordered pizza and talked with the kids about crucifixion and resurrection.

We didn’t really plan on the conversation going there, but in getting tripped up over flawed, flawed cover stories about why the Easter bunny’s treats in the baskets had price tags on them ( I really don’t get the myth behind the creepy bunny anyway, so it’s a hard one to get behind), we shifted gears to telling them where the story of Easter really came from.

Enter stage left- crown of thorns and nailing to a cross. Exit stage right- rising from the dead and a weeping mother.

We don’t talk a lot about faith in our family. The kids claim to know who God is, and what Jesus represents to many.

But we don’t actively share stories from scripture, and we don’t go to church.

But we do talk about the importance of having an open mind; a mind that takes in ideas, that digests and processes in a thoughtful way, that accepts that beliefs, and reactions and motivations are infinite in our world.

We talk about that a lot. And we are again so fortunate to be living in a place right now where the multitude of human ‘ways’ are present every single day. So while exposure is one thing, ensuring you are responsibly parenting to guide the processing of these ‘ways’ is the hard part. The ‘kids! Let’s go see, hear, feel, taste all things NOW!’ is the easy part. Taking the time to listen to how this is affecting their worlds is the challenge. Finding the right questions to ask, and answering, in turn, their questions in a relevant, respectful and helpful way is the challenge. And ensuring that throughout this exploration they’re starting to form the kind of opinions that you can be proud of… That’s the challenge.

So while this whole ‘story of easter’ sounded like a really profound and impactful exercise, there was a LOT of time spent talking about how bloody His head was from the crown of thrones. And asking how many times they had to bang the hammer to get the nails through his hands.

So not really sure if it had the impact we’d hoped for. But we’ll talk about it again.

Maybe I’ll take them to St. Pat’s or Trinity Church this Saturday and see what we see there. And then have a hotdog in the park afterwards to talk about it all.

I think that sounds about right.

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