To Protect?

Is hiding thing from our kids in the name of protecting them a good thing? Is trying to hide death from them a noble thing?

Yesterday we found out that someone the hubby knows took his own life. Heartbreaking. You get the feeling that someone punched you in the stomach to hear something like that. It is simply awful.

Well this morning we went to grab a card to send to his wife. Leave it to Lula to want to know what is going on. So I let her know that one of daddy's friends husband had died. Well how, she wondered. So I gingerly told her that he took his own life. Her face dropped. She was obviously very confused. I didn't sugar coat it or throw my opinion about anything in there, just the minimal facts.

A few hours later she asked if they had any children. No was all I said. You could tell she was still processing the information.

I could have easily blown her off and told her to mind her own business. Yet children are so much better off to learn about death and sin from a distance if at all possible so I talked to her.

Our kids have been to a hand full of funerals and another hand full of visitations. We walk up the casket, we show them the body, we talk about how it is better to be the house of mourning than out having fun. They have seen marriages crumble and homes broken they have seen the results of sin. We talk about these things as unbiasedly as we can. Only telling them what God thinks of these things.

I know other disagree with me on this. They feel like a child's life should be butterflies and sugar plums but it's not.

Learning these things from the safety and security of a loving home is by far better than finding out when they experience it first hand.

Ecclesiastes 7:2
It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart