Can We be Raccoons?

“Grandma, can we be raccoons?” Ethan asked, as we headed down the stairs to the finished part of the basement. That’s where we store the toys and other treasures that five-year-old boys seem to enjoy.

“Sure.” I answered, knowing what this would involve, or at least what it had involved during many other visits.

Ethan flipped off the light switch at the bottom or the stairs informing me that we needed to save the environment by turning off all lights that we were not using. “Ah,” I thought to myself, “I know what he has been learning in school this past week.” The basement was plunged into a gloomy darkness, perfect for our game of Raccoons.

We half stooped and ran around the basement gathering up “food” for our “nest” in our “cave” and soon the futon was covered with his artificial fruit, blocks of wood that had turned into other kinds of food, and all sorts of other toys that were now imaginary food for raccoons. Fortunately raccoons have quite a varied diet.

We also spent part of our time “killing” things to add to our diet. I was told that we had become evil raccoons and so we killed things for our food.

I debated then about squashing this boy’s vivid imagination and wondered how his mother would feel about this more aggressive behavior. Well, I was pretty sure I knew how she would feel. We raised two girls so I am not always certain how to respond to this grandson’s more obviously boy behavior. My own opinion is that boys need to release some of that aggression while being taught the correct ways to channel it into productive activity, but I wasn’t quite sure how Becki (and John) felt.

Eventually the grandmother raccoon was tired from all that food hunting and she was allowed to rest in one of the raccoon chairs. We have a very nicely furnished cave! The other raccoon continued to run around the cave and down the hallway into the grandfather raccoon’s room doing raccoony things.

All of a sudden the small raccoon collapsed onto the floor near the foot of the chair where (I) the older raccoon was still resting.

“What’s wrong, Ethan?” I asked, with a bit of concern.

“I am dead.” he announced.

“You be dead, too, Grandma.” So I eased my raccoony body (I don’t just collapse anymore) onto the floor and we lay there “dead”. I wondered in my grandmother raccoon head what was going on now. We had never died before.

Before I could even inquire Ethan sprung up from the floor, did some raccoony stretching and announced, with great joy, “we are alive again, we have been resurrected!”

I sprang up also (well, o.k. I eased myself up off the floor) and we ran around the basement joyously.

“Now we are good raccoons!” Ethan announced. “We don’t kill things anymore!”

“How come?”, I asked.

“Because, we are resurrected!” Ethan looked at me as though I should have known that. “When we are resurrected we can only be good raccoons.”

We continued to hunt for food. Actually we put all the “food” away so we could hunt for it all over again, but this time we only collected fruits and vegetables, and only ones that are good for us, because we were resurrected raccoons.

This all took place the week before Easter and reflected what Ethan had been learning in Sunday School (where Becki is one of his teachers) and from conversations at home.

Later, as I was telling the Grandfather raccoon about our play in “the cave” I could hardly keep the tears from flowing. A prayer went up from my heart that Ethan will continue to find great joy and excitement about the resurrection and a growing understanding of what that means for us.

He may not have all the concepts quite right, but we are now “good” because of Christ’s resurrection – his victory over death, the price for our sins. Like this little “raccoon” we should all be running around with great joy and jubilation hunting for the treasures hidden in life around us by our resurrected king.