(thing) by Lometa Thu Nov 16 2000 at 18:50:59

The days are cold and crisp now on my daily walk. Children fleeting and flitting like cyclones of the crunchy brown leaves underfoot, they tumble out of homes and into the street eddies on bicycles and roller blades.........parking their scooters under my kitchen table while they play computer games swept up in the perpetually frozen era of childhood.

Silence swallows and time elapses. I am no longer so easily allowed into their private worlds. I can only hope to love them the way they want to be loved. With respect and kindness, provide the opportunity to talk, a ride to the store for a treat or a surprise ride home from school so they don't have to ride the bus. Mid-adolesence, a time to develop the perfectly congeniallity to the demands of the spirit--with great resources of will and no self....attempts to say what one is and what one wants, in any day-to-day, practical way. To establish oneself with no clear boundaries utilizing wills to give shape to their own.

He declared at the restaurant,
I would like to get a restraining order on someone, how do I do that? his body fixed in an ireful slouch.
On who? I asked with small alarm.

After two years of hiding in the library at lunch, being harassed-- Piggy! and hard mean --pokes in his sides Number Two Son has reached his plausible limit. I encouraged him to write the names of the tormentors down and suggested we try the school principal first.

The next day I placed a phone call, deliberately a few moments before he walks through the door. Soon the principal returns my call and he's on the phone gathering the information. He will speak to them and please come by his office if they continue the harassment. I hope they decide to end it here. They are too old now to sit down over a bowl of Spagettios to read a story about how hurtful teasing can be.

At the age of maybe four or five, Number Two Son would complain that Jacob or Brandon wouldn't 'take his sorry' and that they 'won't give me their sorry' as if it was a not an adjective but a thing... a possesion. Sorry's to him were a gift to give, a notable endowment, voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation. I let him think this...... it was much too precious to explain away and he was so right about it. Such wise thoughts .....

Experience teaches it. It is learned through the body and the spirit, not the mind, which is why advice helps so little. One must allow oneself an education of experience.

Now there are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but it is the same Holy Spirit who is the source of them all.
1 Corinthians 12:4 (NLT)

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