Little Miss and The Fruits of the Spirit

I forgot how much material can be found in a child's interpretation of heaven, God and how it all works.  Little Miss, a walking bubble of questions, keeps us on our toes when it comes to bedtime Bible stories.

One day last week we started reading about John the Baptist.

"He had messy hair, wore animal skins and ate locusts.  Do you know what locusts are?" I asked.

Blank faces.

"Grasshoppers," answered Mr. Man.

"Eww!" came the cries.

I read, "John says, 'The axe is awaiting! If you do not bear a tree with good fruit it will be cut down and thrown into the fire!'"  Harsh words.

"What kind of fruit would you bear if you were a tree?" I asked, trying to keep their attention.

"An apple tree!"

"A Maple Tree! Oh, that doesn't have fruit."

"Maple syrup, I suppose."

"I would be an oak tree so I could grow nuts, " said someone extremely mature.  Snort, snort, snicker, snicker, hahaha...

"But I can't eat nuts!" cried the innocent, food-intolerant Little Miss.  More snorting, snickering and laughing.

This was getting out of hand.

"Well, the Bible says the fruit of the spirit are love, joy, peace patience..." I pulled on the reigns, "Those are the fruit we need to grow."

I won't go into the questions on throwing trees into the fire.  I really had no answers for that...

The next night, we read about Jesus being tempted in the dessert, and how Satan would have us make bad decisions and lead us to sin.

"Remember the fruits of the spirit?" I asked, "he would like us to have bad fruit.  What are some bad fruit?"

"Locusts," said my son, remembering John the Baptist's choice of food. Snort, snort, snicker, snicker, bwahaha...

"Um, no... How about lying [eyeballing my daughter], or cheating, or picking on your sister [eyeballing my son]? Those are the bad fruits."

"And you get your tree chopped down!" Little Miss cried out, very seriously.

Ah, yes. Exactly. "Quick, let's pray."

There was a whole lot more discussion from Mr. Man about forgiveness, bible memorization (how can Jesus possibly know that when he doesn't have a Bible in his hand? Little Miss asked), and how sin is not actually a good thing (good grief), but we'll leave it at that.  We straightened out some ideas and helped confuse others.

Sigh.  Teaching the Bible is exhausting. I'd rather teach Math.