Growing Pains

The RDP prompt for today is kindness. I searched my draft folder and found this incomplete post that had been written in October 2011.

When I read it this morning, I remembered some of the difficult circumstances of that time. It was years before my brother died, years before I was helping care for my mother, years and years before my father died.

Just because I wasn’t dealing with death, it doesn’t mean life was easy. I had my hands full in other ways. My children at that point ranged in age from 7 to 26. I was homeschooling two, had one in public school, some in college, some working, one married.

Without further ado, here is the unnamed post which I will call “Growing Pains.” If it feels incomplete, maybe it is.

---

One of the most profound things I heard Andrew Peterson say was not at Hutchmoot, but at a concert in Cortland.  He was talking about his books, the Wingfeather Saga. (Note: he was still in the process of writing the series. The final book wasn’t published until 2014.)  I didn’t write this down or record it so it may not be verbatim, but I think it’s fairly close.  He said,

The main character in these stories is a boy named Janner.  When I started writing, I saw the man he would become, but I knew that he would have to go through many trials and difficult situations to become that man.  I knew that he would have to suffer some terrible things…

I have been thinking about some of the difficulties my own children have had to endure.  They are rather small in comparison to Janner’s battles with Fangs and Gnag the Nameless, but they shape my children nonetheless.

And then I started thinking about that whole idea conversely.  If my children didn’t suffer anything, how would they turn out?

For instance, in order to develop perseverance, they need to stick with difficult situations and work them out.  If I allow them to quit every time the going was hard or not fun or required something of them, they would become the kind of adults who always take the easy path, who quit, who are unreliable.

In order for them to develop compassion, they need experience some hard times and also experience unwarranted kindness to them.  I imagine that the guy in the Good Samaritan story who had been attacked by robbers didn’t later cross to the other side of the road to avoid helping someone who was different from him, although without his experience, he may very well have looked the other way instead of helping.

To develop patience, they need some annoyances.

To develop peace, they need some turmoil.