Noah is trying to figure things out
Last night we read a chapter out of Little House on the Prairie. Noah was pretending to be a wolf yesterday so I told him in the morning that I knew a story about a little girl who woke up and saw that wolves were surrounding her house. I told him we could read the story tonight instead of our chapter book.
After we read it, we started talking about how Laura and her family didn’t have a door on their house and how they didn’t have glass in their windows. We talked about how it was a long time ago and how they didn’t have lots of things that we have now.
Noah said, “Were you and Daddy there then?”
“No, and neither were Gram or Gramps, or Grandma or Grandpa.”
He thought about this.
“It was so long ago,” I added. “That all the people who were there then are dead now.”
“When are you going to die?” he asked.
“Not for a long time. Not until I’m 80 or 90.”
“Make it 90,” he said. “How long is 90?”
“It’s very long. It would take a long time to count that high. Aunt Marian is more than 90.”
“How are you going to look when you’re old?” he said, obviously picturing Aunt Marian. “I know you’ll have a lot of wrinkles but how else?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll probably have white hair.”
“How come?”
“Because most old people do.”
“But why?”
“I think when you get old, your body gets tired and your hair gets tired of making color so your hair turns white.”
“Unless you dye it, and then it could be any color.”
I agreed that this was true and we sat silently for awhile. Then Noah must have thought of a historical farm we visited awhile ago.
“So how did all those things come? How did God make all those things? I remember at that farm they had dirt roads. How did God make all the other things come?”
“God didn’t make those things, people did.”
“How?”
“Well, it took a lot of people and a lot of thinking. People thought about those things and then they thought of ways to make them. It took a long time.”
“They were workers.”
“That’s right.”
“Where did those workers come from?”
“They came from their mommies and daddies because everybody starts out as a baby.”
Now here Noah sat up. He was clearly thinking hard.
“I don’t know how that happened, how God made people out of that clay,” he said. He’s been talking about the book of midrash we read in December. He was fascinated with the part about God making people out of clay and even though I’ve told him it’s a story, he believes it in a way he doesn’t believe other stories. “But what I want to know is who took care of the babies when it was just all babies.”
“Noah, that is a really big question. It’s a really grown-up question. Nobody knows how people really came to be but they think of stories to try and figure it out…”
“I think I know,” Noah interrupted me. “I think probably God made *people* first and then *they* had babies.”
And that was it. He was done with the discussion.
I think I’m going to get some books with other creation stories in them. I used to have one of Native American stories but it’s gone missing. Anyway, I think we can read some of them together and talk about them.
He’s thinking about God a lot. The other day he said, “I think God lives in the sky because in the Raffi song he says, ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’ and he couldn’t do that unless he wasn’t on this earth so he must be in the sky.”
Makes me wish I had my own theology straight.
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