obamaphilia?

I am so very amused by this article. Check it out. And then I promise, I'll give the obsession a rest for a bit.

obama

I'm getting a bit groupie-ish over Obama (he won thirteen states last night!). I know. I'm sorry. But I love this video. And even better, it's the guy from the Black Eyed Peas (guilty pleasure!).

offspring

"Mom! My reading homework is on the floor!" This, from our eight-year old over breakfast the other morning. At the time, said reading homework was about one inch from his toe. I, on the other hand, was in a separate room washing the dishes. "Well then, you pick it up." I advised him. "Oh .... okay," he replied, as if the thought had never occurred to him.

Kids are funny sometimes, aren't they? And by funny, I mean super annoying (but we love them anyway). Having kids is a life-changing, all-consuming fire. I don't think you can realize that fully until you have one. And it's not just the minivan, the menagerie of toys littered everywhere, or the utterly profound havoc (on things like sleeping, private time in the bathroom or your transverse abdominal muscles) they seem to wreak. These beautiful creatures -- sometimes selfish or spoiled, and other times innocent, perfect and wise -- become the center of your world.

Also kids can make an already convoluted thing like a faith metamorphosis (I'm kicking around that word in lieu of crisis ... what do you think?) about a million times trickier.

I have eschewed certainties. I've lost them. But I feel like I'm moving forward. Because I'm no longer chasing them. I am becoming an unapologetic fence rider. Skeptical, doubtful ... but hopeful. I walk towards the idea of God. I continue to seek. But I always seem to find more questions than answers. For awhile now, I've been searching for a landing place. A new place to set my stake in the ground. But I am coming to a realization. Not only am I not going to land back at the beginning. I'm not going to land. I will keep seeking and growing. No stakes in the ground for me, anytime soon. And while it becomes no less messy, it really does grow less scary.

Except when it comes to my kids.

There's a lot that I leave behind without backward glance. I don't want to raise my kids mired in the belief that they are inherently broken and depraved. I don't need them to hear stories of world-wide destruction, babies being murdered, or kings choosing wives like cattle from a beauty-pageant-like lineup of women. I have no doubt that we can give them a moral compass outside the constraints of religion.

But there's an easy simplicity to "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so." We can't give that to our kids any more. Our answers to their questions are never going to be "because the bible says so." I'm more than okay with that. Because I don't believe those answers will or should suffice for long. But I want so much for them to have faith. For them to find a connection to God that is (to quote my nephew) "stripped of the dead weight of unnecessary and somewhat dangerous beliefs." And the path to get to that place is a lot more crooked.

I don't want a faith that never grows out of its Sunday-school certainties, or its black-and-white absolutes. To me, those things would feel like hollow certainties and false absolutes. And I don't want to raise my kids in that kind of faith either. But it's difficult enough to navigate through a maze of grays as a thirty-two (ugh) year old. Let alone as a six-year old, a ten-year old, a fifteen-year old. And as I do in many things (as all parents do), I just wish for a smoother, easier road for my kids, than the one I've had to walk myself.

But I haven't yet found a handy-dandy manual on how to raise faithful, peaceful, loving, tolerent, critical and thoughtful kids. No magic bullet. So I do the only thing I can. I continue to walk forward towards faith ... holding my kids' hands along the way. And praying for wisdom.