God's Boys will be good boys!
What a pleasure it was to discuss English Lit with my 17 year old! Watching God place the baton in the next generation's hands and cause sympathies to emerge from the soul of the future. It was delightful.
They say a son is a son, till he finds a wife. It is clear that my sons are wedded to the gospel from the earliest days. They are never mine. Not in the way that the girls have been. I must pry and press for any answer of what they are doing or thinking. I saw the word sepulcher on the laptop and decided that it was time to press for some interaction.
I am grateful for every contribution he gives. He said, You know what, I missed the end of the world this time. It passed without a hitch. I am glad, I responded. But what is it about a sepulcher that you are looking at. English is getting me down, was the response. This was the second interaction about an emotional downer in school. I had to tag this second and jump on it with both feet. These interaction are getting fewer and fewer with age. My very aware husband is always trying to keep me from wrapping my apron strings around the boys, because of my over mothering tendency and this keeps me at arms length in most subjects. This emotional stuff is my subject. Walkers don't talk about those kinds of things. We have gotten along for generations without the help of a psychiatrist and I will not have you making my son shrink happy, was the underlying theme, understood. I persisted none-the-less.
The Scarlet Letter was read by my sensitive lad, {that is you Enoch, if you are reading this}. I remembered the heart palpitations that were mine in the reading and the watching of this dramatic story. I remembered other short stories that haunted my heart and still crop up in the midnight hours of a halloween season or other. We interacted on this theme for all of 10 minutes, a very long time on a sensitive theme such as this. Not another word, except to say that, I think that the story is sensitive because it is a part of our personal history and the smoke that could have been the lot of our own souls, but especially my dearest Grandmother makes the story ring more true for us. God sent a godly and Christian family to pray for my Grandma and lead her to see that repentance is the key and not the situation of her state with the church on earth. She was able to see a way out, right from the door into Hell, as it were. I believe that God saved her. The Lord is real and I am grateful that I had memorized the Documents of Vatican II before reading the Scarlet Letter. I think that this gave me some stablization in the reading of it.
Enoch said, Mom, I felt alone in the reading of it. I felt dark and without direction. It is my opinion that we should never leave children without direction in the reading of such things as this. It seems situational. It questions the goodness of God. It questions the reasonableness of all that we profess. Or should we? On second thought, I believe it may have been good to let him to himself in the reading; that if we ever needed the Lord, or call out to the Lord for His realness, it is when we are faced with a dilemma such as the Scarlet Letter, or other such ironies of our own lives. Especially, when we have a tendency to self righteousness, we should look at the chains of our own pride that would lead us to Hell, if not vanquished by the stronger than the strong man, Jesus. We do not know how to pray as we ought. Left to ourselves we would make a mockery, even of the gospel. God gives us both sides the side of righteousness in self, needing cleansing and the side of perversity and dirt, so clearly needing cleansing. God give us grace to walk with You and not to lean to our own understanding.
