By: Keith Kappes
Columnist
Carter County Times
Sometimes we adults overthink the challenge of explaining to children what we believe are complicated ideas or concepts.
We tend to forget that, in most cases, a child’s mind has yet to be cluttered with all of the useless stuff like old jokes and personal trivia we’ve been absorbing since our own childhood.
My experiences as a father and grandfather tell me that children often find a way of explaining things in simple terms based on their limited life experiences.
For example, one of our daughters was trying to explain the basic concepts of repentance and forgiveness to her seven-year-old son.
She felt she was struggling to make him understand the similarity between relationships with our earthly parents and those of our Heavenly Father.
At both levels, we human beings regularly make mistakes and seek forgiveness. The part about having our slate wiped clean seemed difficult for the little guy to grasp.
In what his mother came to describe as an “a- ha” moment, his face lit up and he asked:
“Mom, is it like those of us on earth are pencils and God is the eraser?
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My wife recalls the struggles she had with our first son who didn’t like to put things away and who believed that keeping his room tidy was a waste of time.
Rather than put his personal belongings in their assigned places, he preferred to hide them either under his bed or in his closet covered by a blanket.
He and his mother were coming home on the freeway one night with a new moon that suddenly disappeared behind a cloud bank. Noticing him searching the sky, his mother asked if he knew what had happened to the moon.
With a slight chuckle, he responded:
“It’s either behind those clouds or Heavenly Father is hiding it in his closet like I do.”
Keith Kappes can be reached at keithkappes@gmail.com