Jalaina

Just the other night at bible school I saw my youngest son and his best little buddy sitting next to each other. For whatever reason she decided it would be a good idea to begin poking him repeatedly with her finger. This distressed poor Jasper greatly. It also got his friend in a bit of trouble. Later on that night I was talking to jasper and asked him if he was excited to go back to bible school and he said yes. I want to go back to bible school to see Alaina.  Of course he went back to bible school the following night and the first person he wanted to see was Alaina.

I think kids get it right most of the time on relationships. My oldest son Roman will be playing with his friends in the yard and somehow or another he'll get his feelings hurt. Often times he will come inside with his heart broken and he won't want to go play any more for a minute. But as he begins to consider his options he begins to realize that without friends life isn't as fun of a place to play. Soon he's very willing to forget whatever his buddies did to him in lieu of the fun that is to be had.

The same is true for Jasper and his friend Alaina. We have adopted the practice of calling them collectively "Jalaina" because they are always together. They play really hard together and sometimes they argue pretty hard as well. One thing is for sure, however, and that is that when they see each other the always go running to each other and hug and go right to doing whatever it is that jalaina does.

Even I can remember as a boy and teenager fighting with the neighbor kids or rolling around on the ground wrestling with them. We'd get angry at each other but the next day we'd be best friends. Interestingly enough it just seemed natural that even though people would make us angry or hurt us the world is a lot better place with people to share it with. I guess maybe that is why we mended our fences so well.

As we get older our viewpoints seem to change. Somehow we seem to lose sight of the things that made so much sense when we were children. Maybe it's because we begin to feel more "important". Maybe it's because we become more selfish. Whatever the reason we seem less resolved to fix things and move on and more resolved to making sure that other people have learned their lesson or paid their price.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't face consequences for what they do wrong, however, so many times people will fall out and not speak for days, months, or even years over something that could be simply moved past. I'm not now and I have never been an advocate of letting people walk all over you, but I also am not an advocate of harboring resentments as they tend to do me more harm than good. I rather search for ballance as best as I can.

I could get very preachy on this, but the nature of this blog isn't evangelical. If anyone wants to ask me about my extrme right wing judeo christian religious and political beliefs I'm more than accessible for that. I rather aim to use this space to make commentary from a common sense point of view. This is not to say that I will not touch those areas, but rather to say that sometimes Gods greatest messages are the ones that come from common sense.

Common sense is, as they say, not so common anymore. Maybe it's time we as adults learned, yet again, from kids a thing or two about how to treat others. Perhaps more importantly we could learn how to respond to others when they don't treat us properly.