Once the hurdle of teaching a child to read has been crossed, the world opens up into a vast oasis. There is nowhere that the child cannot go! The fun part for you, the parent, is that many trips can be taken with your children right on your own couch!
For the last week or so, we have been visiting an old cowboy town, way out west during the late 1800s, while never leaving our home. We sit on the couch, but our minds are hundreds of years away in a place that our bodies have never been.
We go together. We are a group, eavesdropping on a group of cowboys and a new evangelist in their town. We wait, and watch, and hope, as tragedy weaves its ugly way through their lives, to see how each will respond to this missionary, sent from God. Will they be angry? Will they reject him and his Message?
But there’s also something else that happens in our living room. We learn-together. From time to time, we pass over a word that they don’t know. From time to time, we pass over a word that I don’t know! We look it up, we learn it. We continue on our voyage across the prairie.
There’s other things that happen too. We feel together, as we read through the trials of those in the story. We laugh at their folly, we smile at their jokes, we wince at their shame, but given that my children are 5/6 boys, we don’t cry- but we feel the seriousness of their situation. Our minds race together and we feel relief that it is not our home that suffers as some do in these stories.
What about you dear mother, dear father? What land or bridges have you crossed with your children today? What mountains have you scaled? What seas have you sailed?
Is it cold at your house today? Has homework got everyone in a tizz? Is the mood of your home just a little off today for reasons that can't be helped? Is it raining at your house today? I say, batten down the hatches, pull your children close, and take a journey!
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