Purple Gorilla's

A few weeks ago, our family devotion was on fact and opinion. We wanted to teach our kids about truth.  As we read our Bible passage, we began to explain that things such as food, clothes, sport teams and so forth are examples of opinion. There are some things that we have the freedom to choose what we like and do not like. However, there are other things that are truth, whether one agrees or disagrees because God has set a standard. Tim and I were thinking that we must be doing a pretty decent job of explaining this to the kids because they all seemed to be listening intently. I should not have been surprised when Abbi interrupted me midsentence with this statement, “Mom, so it’s like if I think gorilla’s are purple but you say they are black.” All I could think was, “What?” Honestly, I couldn’t even understand what would make her think of that example in context of what we were discussing, much less have a good reply.  This was one of those moments where I wish I could crawl in her brain to see what’s swirling around in there. The purple gorilla completely stumped me. Thinking that the kids were completely missing the lesson, we just wrapped up the devotion and said our bedtime prayers. We thought that maybe we needed to wait a while before trying to explain fact and opinion. However, a few days later, Abbi brought up the purple gorilla’s again. Probably sensing my confusion on the matter, I suppose she decided to prove to me that she understood exactly what had tried to teach them. To my surprise, she explained that if a gorilla is black, but she says it’s purple, that doesn’t make it purple. She may not believe that it is black, but it is still black. I have to say, I felt proud and ashamed all at once.  Abbi had thought of a good example, after all. In fact, she was saying exactly what we were saying, just with an Abbi spin. Her example was so out of the box (I still don’t know where it came from!), however, that I could not stop to realize she was grasping the lesson. It was then that I realized not only how different my daughter and I are, but how much her perspective can contribute. This black and white brain would have thought of some kind of boring example, but not Abbi. As a mom, if I am going to parent her well, I must learn to get past that fact that she just approaches things differently.  Rather than being dumbfounded at her thought process, I’m going to have to appreciate her creative way of thinking. I will probably never fully “get” her, but I’m a little jealous of all the color in her life!