We have five children. Some of them are just natural rebels. If they are reading this, I’ll let them decide of whom I speak. Oh, to be sure, all of our children have had their moments, and I wouldn’t want it any other way, but a couple of our kids, during their teenage years, just had that terrifying, terrific quality that automatically pushed against just about everything. There’s a part of me that loves and respects a rebel. I admire the originality of a rebel, the spirit, the fire. I am a closeted rebel. Pushing against most of the conventional ideas, but too afraid to put it out there and risk getting in trouble or displeasing someone. So I admire someone who just puts it out there and doesn’t give a fuck.
One of our rebels spent months in high school grounded. Car keys taken away, cell phone taken away. I tried everything I could think of to try to curb her enthusiasm for risk taking, but I was wholly unsuccessful during those years.
When this beautiful rebel turned eighteen, halfway through her senior year in high school, she announced she was going to move out. I tried everything I could to talk her out of it. I told her if she did, she was “on her own” with no help from me. She didn’t care. She was determined to do it and pointed out to me that she would do it with or without my help.
At the time, she was finishing up high school at a small private school. She told me she really wanted to finish, and she hoped that I would support her in continuing to pay for the things I was currently paying for: school, books, her cell phone, an allowance that covered gas and miscellaneous items. Everything else she was prepared to pay for herself: her rent, utilities, food.
I struggled.
I wondered if, by continuing to pay for the things I was paying for now, I would be enabling this choice that I disapproved of. And, let’s be honest, I was terrified for her to try to finish school while working and living on her own. What if she didn’t finish?
Then, for some reason, I thought of the the story of the prodigal son. And something I hadn’t noticed before jumped out at me. The father gave his son all the resources necessary to go out into the world. I’m pretty certain that the father knew his son and knew that he wasn’t going to go out and live the straight and narrow. By the time our kids are young adults we know them pretty well. We know which ones are the rule followers and which ones aren’t. We know which ones are cautious and which ones aren’t, which ones learn through observation and which ones learn through the hard knocks of experience.
And the father gave the kid money to go out and fail.
I had never thought about it that way before. I had thought about the part of the story where the father is merciful and welcomes the son back with open arms, but I just hadn’t considered that the father GAVE the kid the resources to go sin it up.
This paints a different picture of the divine doesn’t it?
I mean, I was raised to believe that god is all about keeping us from sin. “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”
Right?
And yet, in the prodigal story, the father basically says “yes, here you go. I know you will be doing evil with this and here it is anyway.”
If you’ve read many of my posts, you know I have a dubious attitude toward evil. I’m not sure that much of the stuff we’ve thrown into the evil category is evil at all.
But that aside, it’s still interesting to think that in this story, the father allowed the son to go, and knew at a minimum he would get himself in a pickle and at maximum he could harm himself. The father knew it was not going to end well, and the father funded it.
I don’t throw this story out there as a lesson in parenting, but as a thought to ponder about god. Jesus is telling us in this story what god is like.
A different perspective.
On god.
And on evil.
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