unscriptured

Posted in unscriptured, by Toby T, Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 12:01 am.

I recently completed the ordeal of selling a house during the deflating of a real estate bubble and the subsequent purchase of another house. Obviously the buying was less fraught with uncertainty then the selling, but that’s not what I want to talk about today.

One of the things that made the whole process bearable and overall actually pleasant was the kindness, generosity and forbearance of some good friends who put me up in their guest quarters for the duration of the affair. As is usually the case, this arrangement came with many plusses and with many minuses. Thankfully, the plusses far outweighed the minuses, or at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I don’t have the space to make an exhaustive list of the two sides of the ledger, nor do I have the talent to make such a list entertaining, so like always, I’m just going to talk about what interests me at the moment.

A big entry on the minus side is that these friends have three kids, who, while I was there, went from being nine, five and three, to being ten, six and four. The balancing entry, the big plus that more than made up for those kids, was also those kids. Kids of those ages can soak up an enormous amount of attention and still ask for more. They can be argumentative, self-centered, reckless and demanding. But also they are kind, fascinating, joyful and spirited. It is a wonder to be able to watch their personalities develop and grow on a daily basis.

And now I’ve moved out, and I’m missing out, and I’m missing them.

I don’t have any kids of my own, but I get what some of the joy of parenting is about. One aspect is the passing on of knowledge. There’s an incredible plethora of things we know, some that we’ve learned the hard way, and some that we’ve learned the easy way. When we have kids, we get a certain satisfaction from knowing that we’ll be there when the kid has a question, that we’ll be able to let them learn the easy way some of what we learned the hard way. And we also get a certain satisfaction in knowing that the unique array of knowledge that makes us who we are, will, at least in part, be duplicated in someone else. It’s a little bit of immortality, the mental equivalent of passing on our genes.

And that’s what God has charged me with doing in this blog. The questions I ask him, the conversations he and I have, they’re uniquely mine, they’re not the conversations he has with anyone else. And I get to pass them on to you.

You are all my children.