Thursday, March 31, 2011

Resorting to an oversimplified answer

Ethan has become very inquisitive. We get constant questions about how the world works. For example, “Why Daddy go work?”, “Why Mommy Daddy married?”, or “Where sun come from?” He’s not shy about follow-up questions either. When he asked, “Where thunder come from?”, we talked about lightning and how it makes a big boom. “Where boom come from?” That was a tough one, trying to explain in even the simplest terms about air pressure to someone who only partially understands what air is.

Today for the first time, I was at a loss for any semblance of an answer that would capture man’s knowledge of a subject into a buo-sized nugget. When we were walking down by the river, Ethan asked, “Why water moving?” That wasn’t too hard: high ground, low ground; water goes down, like in the sink. The follow-up was the trouble: “Why ground high?” I just couldn’t see cracking the lid on glacial carving, so I bypassed a few thousand years of history and went straight to, “That’s how God made the land.” I may not have been satisfied, but Ethan was. Of course, overall I am thoroughly satisfied with how many wonderful opportunities we get to tell Ethan about the wonderful world God has given us.