March Photo-Dump

I didn’t need a photo-dump or a delicately selected #misplacedmagnet to tell me that March was about questions. My head is full of them still, and I’m hoping April showers will bring more than usual this year.

(Although May flowers would still be nice, because whatever nibbled my tulips to death last spring is back and I’m stinking angry about it. If I catch whatever it is, we’re having stew. Plant-based diet be … put on hold.)

Sometimes his expression evokes the questions he doesn’t yet have words for. Sometimes he wears a guitar cable like a bandelier and bangs on a stock pot with his little, wooden Thor hammer, and his expression seems to ask what you could possibly be asking. Silly me.

For him, in this season, questions lead to discovery. Large domesticated rabbits on thrones in the mall, puddles, mud, foods, books … His greatest, most pressing questions can be explored, answers found, consequences minimal.

Unless it’s after lunch and he hasn’t had a nap, then the consequences are sometimes tragic. Sometimes Jesus gets decapitated. 

I pray he’ll always have those questions – the kind answered in exploration. I pray he’ll always have the same courage in the face of the unknown.

That he’ll wonder about food and books and animals and landscapes, and he’ll dive into each of them to find answers to his questions.

But I know that curiosity will be augmented. That those aren’t the only questions he will be asking after a while. And I know that love and hate, life and death, beauty and pain have no easy answers, but I hope and pray for the same courage and the same determination in his little heart all the same.

I pray that he won’t stop asking when the questions get hard, when the answers don’t come.

Or when the answers do come, but turn out to be harder than the questions.

I pray that he won’t shy away, won’t get intimidated, won’t withdraw. That he’ll keep his heart open and soft. That he’ll laugh at the funny parts and cry at the sad parts, and be okay with the fact that there are funny parts and sad parts.

I wish I could keep him in a place where the questions are all about crayon colors and ice cream flavors, but the truth is that we sometimes only ask questions with easy answers because we’ve spent all weekend asking questions with no answers, and we need to be able to decide on a chocolate malt instead of a vanilla one because it feels good to have at least one answer.

The truth is that the ice cream questions will only produce simple, sugary answers in him, and he has so much more to offer the world than sprinkles.