Last Summer I was in Albania travelling from Tirana to Fushe Kruja virtually every day to work on the church there. For that reason I missed the annual visit my niece and nephews make to my parents’ house. My parents will be hosting their four grandchildren for the next five or six weeks, and so I am suddenly and totally immersed in an energy-driven whirlpool of imaginative ideas and curious notions, theories on the scientific and fantastic, nonsense and unpredictably clever thoughts and utterances.
The kids are ages 12, 10, 7 and 5. I still find myself in awe of the richness of the human animal’s DNA. How can four children, all products of sperm from the same man and eggs from the same woman, be so completely different from one another? In my sociological studies we constantly were asked to wrestle within the rink of the “nature vs. nurture” debate. I am leaning towards nature as the chalkboard over which nurturing experiences are drawn and superimposed. All of these kids are well behaved, confident, educated, and creative. None of them are a facsimile of either parent or of another sibling. Each of them has a delightful mind, and is a walking treasure.
I would like to close with a quote from Luke, the 5 year old:
“Why is God waiting to stop the devil? Because the longer the devil is alive, the more bad things he can do.”
albaniacalling 