In the last couple of months, Daniel and Lucy have experienced existential questioning and struggles with faith, respectively. At dinner the other night, Daniel revealed that he keeps asking himself, “Why am I here?” He said that he can't stop asking himself the question and gets a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. He wonders where he’d be if he weren’t here. This is evidently happening when he is not reading the sports page, eating, taking standardized tests, striking people out during baseball games, reading books, going to church, watching sports, and trying to get his family to:
1. Play sports
2. Watch sports
3. Allow him to eat junk food.
We’ll see what he comes up with this summer. Fortunately, we have friends who report that their daughter is going through a similar phase, accompanied by a precocious use of irony and sarcasm. Daniel is working on this aspect of the existential questioning.
Lucy (age 7) recently her crisis of faith at bedtime after we read the Bible, prayed, and sang. In other words, it could be a crisis, or a sophisticated bedtime stalling technique similar to our niece Joy's (age 3) tactic of saying, "My nook fell out of bed" or "Mama, I need to cut my finger nails." Still, it's interesting that she hit some of the highlights. Here's what she said:
"Daddy, is the Bible real? I can't believe that people can live to be hundreds of years old. I can't believe that everyone on earth spoke the same language. I can't believe that Jesus turned water into wine. And I REALLY can't believe that a woman who is not married can have a baby."
Fortunately, she still believes in the resurrection.
