Why Have All These Children Been Given All These Swords?

Elphine won her first little fencing match or parry or whatever it's called last night. She was paired up with a younger kid who wasn't very much smaller than her, who has been doing it a lot longer, and who would never say 'touch' when she got him, or whatever it's called. They went at it pretty intensely and the teacher stood back and laughed to himself. It was so shocking to see Elphine, who in every other lesson has been silent as a mouse trying to keep up and do what she was told, suddenly go at it with her big long sword, keeping her feet basically in the right way and pushing the other kid all the way back to the wall. He kept retreating and so, in some surprise I think, she kept advancing. Then the teacher picked him up by the back of his collar and said, 'did you say touch?' knowing that he hadn't said touch.

You spend your whole life taking sharp and dangerous objects out of their grubby little mitts and then it culminates in you paying money for them to wave long dangerous swords at each other. Thank heaven for the little rubber stoppers on the ends.

Anyway, Elphine announced to me on the long ride home, in which we hit every single light in Binghamton, that, and I quote, she's “just so tired of all the drama”. Nearly drove off the dark practically third world pot hole filled parkway crying with laughter because there doesn't seem to be anything she loves more, right now, than melodramatically flinging herself about and worrying about 'death' and 'all the suffering, life is so full of suffering'. A rich sentiment coming from someone so healthy and solid and free from all the suffering of the world she thinks it's romantic because she's never actually seen any of it. So I read her some Anne of Green Gables. It seemed the only thing to do.

Thing is, it's such a great gift that she and the others have been given–uncluttered, unworried, unanxious healthy childhoods. I say 'given' but not by me. I haven't been paying that much attention, I am always worrying about something or pushing us along to the next thing. Meanwhile, God has given them health and quiet to grow and become something. But they should learn to parry, to be light on their feet, to weild the sword of the gospel and encounter suffering and evil all around without being brought low. Or at least, I think they should. I expect God will sort it out for them. Meanwhile, I have to make pancakes.