Supers

My son has an abundant affinity for super heroes. It's over the top. He wakes up wanting me to be a bad guy so he can be Iron Man, or Captain America or some other masked crusader; he then proceeds to pummel, punch and yell at me until I'm adequately defeated. The intensity goes up several notches when Dad gets home. I kind of grew up like an only child so the essences of boyhood are so foreign to me, I am learning every day how differently they tick. Maybe it's more of a...tock.

I'm wondering how I can tie his media driven super hero obsession to MY hero obsession, I want to know how to help him understand that God is a super hero that can beat up all the other super heroes, that HE MADE UP super powers!!! The issue I'm running into stems from a profound statement Asher made just today. During nap time we cuddled June and sang a song and I tickled his back a little bit, then he looked at me with dense and sleepy half closed eyes as he said, "Momma, know why I don't pray? Because when I do God just doesn't talk to me. I feel frustrated and sometimes sad." You see he stopped praying with us for the most part, about six months ago, and we never knew why. We decided not to pressure him. Perhaps he is just now discovering how to articulate his thoughts and feelings, but I'm standing, jaw dropped, on a precipice of unknown here.

My first temptation was to "stage" an answered prayer, tell him to pray for something specific then do everything I can to make it happen. That's my controlling, protective, "Momma Bear" instinct coming out, but it's not a response of faith. Instead I want to have the faith to tell him to ask God for something and then wait patiently and faithfully together as we watch it come to be, but truth is...I'm too scared.

What if God decided NOT to answer him, will Asher spiral into a pit of disappointment and despair, giving up on a God he hardly knows? He's such a tender hearted, emotionally mature child in so many ways, I don't imagine him rebounding from a blow like that as easily as other children. He's not as resilient as other boys seem to be. So here I am wanting my boy to experience God speaking to him the way I have SO many times, but I still stand in fear.

All of this brought to light my own inadequacies of faith, that maybe in the back of my mind God is not actually Asher's super hero, perhaps in my mind, I am. Don't we all want to be this for our children, swooping in at the first sign of trouble, scooping them up before the are the victim of some evil genius scheme? It seems that in my hopes to teach him of a real hero, I'm making myself out to be a better one, and that is a real farce indeed.