If a stranger ever walks into our house in the mid-morning hours, they might think they’ve stepped into Waffle House or iHop or another popular breakfast spot. While I don’t wear a uniform, I do tend to take my place in front of our stove like a short-order cook with pans of bacon, sausage links, hash browns, and melting dark chocolate chips all in different stages of cooking doneness. On the days I am making a fresh batch of waffles rather than reheating waffles in the oven, I also have two waffle makers going.
Breakfast is one of my specialties where my teenagers are concerned.
Usually, as I am moving through this part of my mid-morning routine, the girls are doing independent reading from the stash of library books we have collected for our ongoing unschooling journey. These independent reading books are the source of some wonderful curiosity adventures, especially when the two girls start swapping the facts they are learning. Sometimes those swapping-fact moments grow into deeper conversations that can meander through myriad ideas and topics.
These are some of my favorite morning moments where my teenagers are concerned.
I consider it quite the treat to be privy to their exploration and the expanding of their minds and understanding of the world through what they read. This morning, that included useless science facts for the 15 year old and history facts for the 17 year old. One of the cool things I get to witness during this pre-breakfast interdependent reading time is how they are able to synthesize how facts from one subject relate and interrelate with facts from previous subjects they’ve read about. Truly, there is nothing better than when one of them announces that something they’ve just read reminds them of something they read last week or last month.
As they poured over their respective books, my 17 year old discovered something that she found both amazing for its beauty and distressing for how it had been distorted. In an Usborne book, 100 Things to Know about History, she read that the symbol of the Swastika started out as a symbol of wellbeing and good luck by the Hindus, as well as goodness and happiness according to the Buddhists and Jains. But this symbol was used by cultures as early as 5,000 years ago by people in the Indus Valley (what is now Pakistan) who used this symbol. A similar symbol referred to as the whirling log by the Navajo people in North America was used in ceremonies by their healers. It wasn’t until Hitler put a swastika on the National Socialists flag that the symbol became associated with hatred.
To say that my daughter was surprised and even a little angry would be fairly accurate. Any time the Nazis come up there is always that deep-seated disbelief that people can be so hateful, cruel, and abhorrent. This time, however, in the midst of that initial reaction, our conversation took a surprising turn toward the idea of forgiveness. I’m fairly certain it came about after my oldest daughter asked me to confirm that everything Hitler stood for went against the very ideas of what the Bible says about how we’re supposed to love our neighbors. That led to the idea that not only are we supposed to love our neighbors, but Jesus actually went so far as to tell us we should also love our enemies.
That is some hard stuff to digest before you’ve even had your breakfast.
To help illustrate how this is possible, I introduced Corrie ten Boom and her difficult forgiveness of a former S.S. man at Ravensbruck. I did not tell them the whole story but it is a powerful one. Ten Boom’s words stick with me whenever I am slow to forgive others. She tries twice to raise her arm to take his outstretched hand and whispers two prayers to Jesus to help her, finally praying, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness. Her description of the current she felt pass through her arm from her shoulder to her hand is powerfully convicting where forgiveness is concerned:
“And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
As I turned my attention back to the breakfast foods, my youngest remained uncertain, even unconvinced, about this whole idea of forgiving someone who has done such hurt to us. She doesn’t understand how or why she would do that. I gave her my best flawed explanation that really forgiveness is about freeing ourselves from the anger and the resentment and the bitterness rather than letting off the hook the one who wronged us. She remains unconvinced. And I am okay with that. I have always believed that faith that is not embraced by us is not faith at all. Faith that is accepted based on nothing more than my suggestion or my faith, still is not faith.
We each get to take our journey. And I love that I get the opportunity to walk alongside my girls on theirs, at least for a little while. But I have always let them know that they alone get to decide what they believe. I will answer questions and I will help them find resources if they need or want them. But, more than anything, no matter what they believe or don’t believe, I will always love them with an abiding, abounding, no-matter-what kind of love. Because that’s all I’ve ever known from Jesus. Therefore, that’s all I want them to see or know from me.