When People Are Hurting

Yesterday Campbell lurked through a toy box to unearth an unlikely pad of Christmas stickers. We sat on the porch (in our tank tops and shorts), and Campbell was entertained for a solid 18 minutes peeling off the snow-covered evergreen trees, Rudolphs, Jack-in-the-boxes, dollbabies, and - yes - Abominable Snowmans.

When she got to the dude, whose sticker image admittedly looked scary, she scrunched up her face and said, “Dat guy bad.”

I responded with, “Well, wait, Cam. He’s hurting. Remember about his toothache and how much it hurt him? He was mad all the time, cuz he was in pain. So what if we think of him not as

bad

, but as

needing healed

?”

Silence.

She was well on her way to a sticker of the candy cane variety.

I suddenly remembered that the only viewing for her of the 1939 rendition of Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer was last Christmas and that she was TWO at the time (attention span of a fruit fly). It also struck me that now at three she hadn’t signed up for a discourse in the manifestation of pain in a person, much less a furry white snow creature... that all she wanted was to STICK SOME STICKERS ON A PIECE OF PAPER, MOMMY.

And that was when it became clear to me that the Abominable Snowman lesson was not for her.

It was for me.