In the pages of those books I learned something that I had
never known before. I could go anywhere, be anyone, do anything.
The stories on those black and white pages transformed my
life from what it was at the time to just about anything I wanted it to be. I lived
on the prairie in pioneer times, dressed in long skirts and lived without
modern technologies. I suffered through the depression. I loved and lost.
Explored caves, searched for buried treasure, survived kidnappings and time
traveled.
Every time I opened a new book…I opened a new life.
At the time my love of books was a cross between
entertainment and escape. Books helped me pass many hours in the years when I lived
between childhood and the adult world. They gave me something to do when I wouldn’t
have had anything to do. They were easy to carry anywhere I went and were
always there when I needed them. But they also gave me an escape when I needed
one. Illnesses that left me feeling awful were a little easier to get through
when I could focus on the joys and trials of someone else’s life. Situations I
found myself in that were too difficult to bear became easier when I escaped my
life through the pages of a book.
And so books became my best friend.
I spent many, many hours with those friends.
Now, years and years after first discovering books, I still
enjoy them. There’s something about reading about others, whether real or
fictional, that can’t be found outside the pages of a book. Today I find it
much harder to enjoy a book, not because the stories in them aren’t as good as
the ones I remember from childhood but because I now know that so many of those
stories go against my Lord.
As a child I didn’t care if a book contained time travel or
magic. I didn’t care if it was about murder or other sin. I was simply looking
for a story that could not only hold my attention but one that could transport
me from my world to the world that existed only in the pages of that book. Now I
have a higher standard.
In the pages of a book I now know that there’s so much more
being played out than just what’s happening in the story. Depending on what the
book is about and whether it was written based on Biblical principles comes
through within only a few pages. Some books glorify sin, some degrade my Lord,
others teach falsehoods while claiming to be Biblical, and a few speak truth.
That happens in both fiction and nonfiction.
And what most people don’t know is that within the pages of
a book, no matter what the story is about, the author’s views on everything in
life is slowly being fed into us through tiny bite sized pieces.
There are books that are considered classics, books that
most children have encountered at some point in their lives, whose authors
dabbled in the occult. And once a person knows that it becomes easy to see it
in the pages of the story. But you have to know it to really see it or else you
have to be reading the book with a very discerning eye.
No child is going to read with that kind of discernment.
Most adults don’t read that way. A book is seen as entertainment, something to
pass the time. They can’t do any harm. Or so many believe.
But stories aren’t just written on the pages of a book.
Those subtle influences aren’t penned only in the words portrayed in things of
entertainment.
Stories are written every day, in every person’s life. They’re
written in our minds and hearts with everyone we know. Each encounter we have
with another person writes a story on our life. Some may be fleeting like the
short picture books that passed through our hands when we were children, they
may leave little or no impression. Others are long sagas with many chapters and
hundreds of pages.
What may seem to be an innocent encounter with another
person may indeed form ideas and opinions in our minds and hearts that will
take root for all of our earthly life.
Our children are particularly susceptible to having their
stories altered by encounters with other people and with each experience.
As a homeschooler I have encountered many different ideas on
how to raise children, on how to bring them up in the Christian faith, on what
to let them experience and encounter. There are those among the Christian
homeschool world that believe that a child should never encounter anything that
doesn’t teach them from a Christian perspective and there are those that
believe children should be exposed to as much of the world as possible so that
they know what it’s all about-in those that believe that way some will counter
everything their child encounters with discussions on what they as a family
believe and others let their children form their own ideas and opinions without
trying to influence them.
As a Christian it has become difficult for me to find books
that I feel are okay for me to read. It’s even harder to find books that I feel
comfortable letting my children read. I know that the Lord will either save my
children or not in His time and that there isn’t a book out there that will
keep that from happening but I also know that the things we experience in life
help set our foundation for what we will become. I have a responsibility to my
children and to my Lord to help set the right kind of foundation for my
children.
There were many years in my parenting life that I didn’t
know that. Many years passed where we chose what came into our lives based on a
much looser idea of what was okay and what wasn’t. I remember spending many,
many hours reading chapter books to my oldest when she was too young to read
them herself. Some of her favorite ones were a series about kids that time
traveled with the help of a magician.
Yesterday that same daughter told me how her favorite books
have always been the science fiction type with time travel, fairies, and other
type situations.
Today as I think back on the many hours we spent with that
type of books, as I remember the movies I let her watch and the play I encouraged,
I must also think of the foundation we laid with each page we turned, with each
movie we sat through, with the fairy houses I helped build and the toys I bought
for her. The Lord used all of that in both her life and mine. He used it in the
lives of each person in our family and I’m only now reaching the midpoint of
the story. I’m still reading the book that is our life. I can’t see the end of
the story, I can’t flip ahead to read the last page or the last chapter.
But I can see the influence those stories, movies, and play
have had in my children’s lives long after the time when we stopped letting
them through our front door. I see them when my children reminisce about the
books and movies we once read, when they talk about the things they used to
play. I see them in the smiles those memories bring.
And I see the failures of the ideas I wrote into our story
when I didn’t yet know I was writing a story and I see the failures I write
today when I do know that each day is another page in our story, when each moment
is another sentence in our book.
And there is no delete button.
I can’t erase something once it’s been placed into the pages
of the book of our life. Once a character comes into our story they are there
forever whether they enter our story as real life people, fictional characters
in books or movies, or ideas imparted through someone else. They are all there
increasing the word count in the story that is our life, lengthening the pages
of our book, adding to the story unfolding before our eyes.
As a Christian that now sees there’s a greater story going
on than the story within my life, that now understands there’s a Book that was
written that I never need to worry about the influence it has on my children, I
find myself at odds with my thoughts sometimes.
I must wonder what in the story of our lives is building the
foundation I want to put under my children and what is being written into my
children’s lives that I may be opposed to but that the Lord has put there for
their greater good.
I feel the need to protect them from all that goes against
my beliefs, from all that might lead them astray, but today…so close to the
discussion I had with my daughter yesterday….I must also wonder about the
foundation that has already been laid.
And how that foundation has written words into the book that
is my child’s life.
If our family story is a book then we are all characters in
a continuing saga that will play out for many years to come, Lord willing. We
are a series of books in which the characters are the same but the stories must
eventually separate. We overlap because we have been given to each other for a
time and our stories are all one but as our children grow they must, in time,
move into their own books. Their stories must become their own and not merely a
spot within the pages of the story of their parents lives.
What did they learn while they were in our book? What did
they learn from the influence of the story we write in our own lives? What have
we taught them through the encounters we have allowed them to have?
Was our story written based on Scripture? Can we hand them
over to their own stories, to their own books, knowing that we have shown them,
guided them, in the way that they should go or will we watch with bated breath
as they jump from the pages of our book into the blank pages of their own
without the proper safety net beneath them?
What are we writing on the hearts of our children while we
have them within the pages of our life?
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