Pinocchio

A rather interesting day today~ as part of a program I am involved in with my kids, today I received the packet for this week "lesson". It is the story of Pinocchio.

The lesson plan is set up for toddlers through High School age kids, as is all of these weekly lessons. But this one particularly struck me. The story of Pinocchio and all that he goes through to become a "real" boy has so many parallels to our own lives...

As I read over the lesson plan, the discussion about what happened on Pleasure Island really made an impression on me. Presenting this to young children is a little different than older children. For young children, they sort of know already that drinking, smoking, gambling and such are bad. Most children do not have issues with these sort of things until they are in their early teens.

One of the narratives from the use of the lessons came from a 14 year old boy. His understanding of the Pleasure Island episode really was a real understanding. I am paraphrasing his response as I didn't save it. This young man said ~ So Pinocchio had been given basic instructions for what it would take to be a "real" boy. The Blue Fairy's instructions are like the Bible. We are given our instructions on how to be "real" children of God. Pinocchio lands on Pleasure Island, it is like us, being teens, having freedom out from under our parents careful watch. Pinocchio gets himself mixed up with the wrong kids, like we can if we aren't careful. Then Pinocchio's conscious starts telling him not to do what he is doing, but he ignores it. How many of us kids do that very same thing? So after a while, hanging with the wrong friends, doing wrong things, ignoring his concsious, Pinocchio realizes all of a sudden that he looks like a donkey. Thats what happens to us, we hang out with the wrong friends, make wrong choices, and instead of looking cool like we were hoping, we just look like an ass.

I thought about how right he is... when we ignore our concious, don't follow what we know we need to follow to be "real" children of God, we do end up just looking like ass's.

The lesson of the lies, how Pinocchio's nose grew. When we take part in telling lies, soon we have to face that the lie is affecting our lives in ways we never expected.