Nature Study,  Parenting

Teachable moments involving shrews

You have to admit, it’s an attention-getting title — for its weirdness if nothing else! For the record, I don’t anticipate this as the start of a new blog category on shrews. Nevertheless, this little fellow inspired a rather serious discussion of ethics when he appeared at a pile of birdseed I spilled while filling our front feeder.

My youngest sat out in the cold for a half an hour with the Burgess Animal Book, watching him dart in and out and forming a mental map of his tunnels through the mulch. Her first comment when she came in was, “Don’t tell Daddy about it! He’ll try to kill it!”

Now in reality, she may have been right in her prediction. There was an incident with a shrew a few weeks ago in the back yard, an incident involving a grown man with a shovel and a squalling small mammal that escaped back into the ground. But she repeated her admonition against telling Daddy so many times that it troubled me. I down with her and said, “If we just happened to forget mentioning it to Daddy, that would be no big deal. But if it’s on our mind, and we conceal it from Daddy on purpose to make him do what we want, that’s different. We have to trust each other. We don’t want to treat each other like puppets.”

“Who made you?” she demanded tearfully.

“God,” I replied, taken aback.

“He made it, too! We can’t just go around killing things God made!”

I happen to share her protective impulses toward what Thornton Burgess calls “our friends in fur and feathers.” So I conceded her feelings. But I also pointed out that it would be more honest, and less manipulative, to simply tell Daddy about the shrew if it was on her mind, and then ask him please not to kill it. Then she’d have to trust him.

I was remembering something from Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy about request (not coercion) being primary in our relationships in the kingdom of God, and it seemed important. This morning I found the book and looked it up:

A request by its very nature unites. A demand, by contrast, immediately separates. It is this peculiar “atmosphere” of togetherness that characterizes the kingdom…

We teach our children to say “please” and “thank you.” This is understood to be a matter of respect, and rightly so. But it is also a way of getting what we want or need. It is a way of getting that requires us to go through the freedom of the person asked, however.

We had an interesting conversation. She didn’t accept automatically the concept of lying by omission, and we tried to come up with some examples from the Bible. I thought of Jacob, not taking the cue to reveal his true identity to Isaac when he was impersonating his brother. She thought of Cain, not answering God’s question about where Abel was. I’m not sure how good the examples were; can you think of better ones? She did latch onto the concept, though. And when her daddy got home, she was the first one down the stairs to tell him about it.

In If Jesus Were a Parent, Hal Perkins talks about watching over our children’s hearts, removing “weed seeds” and planting good ones. I see this conversation in those terms; we may have to have others like it where we continue pulling up the seeds of coercion and replacing them with request. But it’s pretty fascinating to observe where the teachable moments can flare up in the midst of the ordinary. A shrew! It makes me want to hear others’ stories about their incongruous teaching moments.

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