The Mind of a Five-Year-Old

I love listening to the things my kids come up with. Ryan, especially, is at an age where he's learning so much and trying to process big questions into his rather limited world view. It's amazing sometimes.

Take this morning for instance. I got a text from a friend saying that her daughter's hamster had died and that her daughter, who is in Ryan's class, was very upset.  I told the boys what was going on and that they should be extra nice to M. today because she was probably very sad.

"Would it be alright if we prayed for her?" Wesley asked.

"Of course it is!" I said and we all bowed our head at the breakfast table. I said a little prayer for our friend and when I was done Wesley said, "That was different from the prayer I said in my mind, but I guess they were both good prayers. Two prayers is okay too, right?"

I assured him that two prayers would be perfectly okay.  Then Wesley told me that he thought M's hamster was in Heaven playing with Sanders, Logray and Isabelle.

"Does everyone that die go to Heaven, Mom?" Ryan asked me.

"Well, everyone who believes in God and Jesus does," I answered.

"So Grandma & Grandpa's mom and dad, and her sister, and J & G's dad, and Daddy's dad and Isabelle are all in Heaven?"

"Yes, and many others as well."

Ryan thought about that for a minute. "You know," he continued. "People are born every day and people die every day."

"That's right."

"I wonder who is going to be born today. And I wonder who is going to die." Ryan paused to take a bite of cereal. "What do we look like in Heaven?" he asked.

Oh boy, I thought. I should have had another cup of coffee. "Well, no one really knows. We know that no one is sick in Heaven and that everyone is happy. We don't need our bodies in Heaven, but there has to be a way we will know each other when we get there. Sanders was really sick and skinny and was hurting a lot. But he won't be like that in Heaven. I like to think we will look like we did when we were happiest and healthiest and that's how we'll know each other."

Thankfully, my answers seemed to satisfy Ryan and we left for school. On the way to school we saw a street sweeper truck.

"Wow! Look at that truck!" Ryan exclaimed. "What is it?"

"That's a street sweeper, or a street cleaner," I said.

"There are two questions I've always wondered about," Ryan said in the same voice he was using to ask about Heaven earlier. "One is what a dog's life is like. Two is what a cat's life is like. Now I have a third one - if it's fun to drive a street sweeper."

I was recounting this exchange with a couple of my co-workers today when one of them said, "You know, all though questions have the same weight to him." And she's absolutely right. Every one of those things is very important to him. The big questions.

I thought all the big questions were over for the day, but Ryan dropped another one on us at dinner tonight.

"I wrote about Sanders, Logray and M.'s hamster in my journal today," Ryan told us.

"That's so nice of you," I said, taking another bite of my dinner.

"How do people get in their Heaven boxes?" Ryan asked out of the blue.

Ryan calls coffins, urns and the kind of box we have Sanders' ashes in "Heaven boxes."

Duane and I exchanged a quick look and I dove in.

"Those things are usually called 'coffins' or 'caskets'.  There are people called 'morticians' whose job it is to get dead peoples bodies ready to go into coffins, or to be cremated and put into an urn, or a little box like Sanders. Some people's whole body is buried in a coffin and some people are cremated and what's left of their body goes in an urn, or little box."

"When someone is cremated, are their boxes as little as Sanders' box?" Wesley asked.

Right about then it occurred to me that this was the second death conversation I was having over a meal in a single day, but it was too late to turn back.

"No, because people are bigger than cats, so there is more left after they are cremated," I said, thanking God that the kids weren't asking me to define cremation. "Remember when Aunt Rochelle died? You saw her box at the cemetery and it was bigger than Sanders' box."

Wesley thought for a second. "Yeah, it was bigger. Not, like really big, but kind of bigger."

Thankfully, we got the subject changed then. And now you know why we don't go out much.