The Other Side of the World

"Where is the other side of the world" and "Is that the other side of the world?" were questions our son Tim began asking as he pointed away to some unidentifiable space. We hardly knew how to answer. Telling him that the earth is nearly 25,000 miles in circumference and that picking out the exact spot for where the other side of the world is impossible was no answer for him. And having no real answer only invites the question to be asked again and again (and again).

There were other repeated questions: "What is a mansion?" and "Is that a mansion?" and, when he learned I was born in Texas, "Am I half cowboy?" were among them . And each morning as we sat at breakfast, there was a whole series, repeated daily, and reflected in the following exchange. For instance:

         Tim:  What are we having for dinner?

         Me:  Chicken.

         Tim:  Did I ever have it before?

         Me:  Yes.

         Tim:  Did I like it?

         Me:  Yes.

         Tim:  What did I say?

Surprisingly, he never argued with me and was never suspicious of my answers--surprising because he didn't mind expressing dislike for some dinners and would not have asked for any of them to be repeated. Knowing Tim, a planner from the get-go, he simply wanted to know how the day was going to end and if it was necessary to begin a campaign for a dinner he liked.

There were also repeated prayers. Tim is a rabid athlete when awake and only less so when he's asleep. It's hard to know how many miles he's walked or feats he's accomplished when he's supposed to be in bed as he sleep walks and talks. In preadolescent years, his night activity would begin around 11:30 PM, just as Paul and I were getting ready to go to bed ourselves. It wasn't always easy at first to tell if he was awake or asleep. He might shoot out of his bedroom door as if he was late for something, wander out as if he was looking for something, or emerge with a message that made no sense. His sleeping questions were particularly interesting. For instance:

         Tim: (wide eyes and anxious voice, always a tell-tale sign) Mom! Mr. N.* is waiting in the  

               driveway and I'm not packed. Where is my suitcase?

         Me: Where is Mr. N. taking you?

         Tim: Is Mr. N. taking me somewhere?

         Me: You just said Mr. N. is in the driveway to pick you up.          

         Tim: Where am I going?

         Me: Oh, for goodness sakes, Tim. You're asleep. 

         Tim: I am not asleep! I just need--I need a--why are you in my bedroom?

His rantings earned him the name "demon boy" given and repeated often by his sisters, and the experience for him must have been troubling because he repeated the same bedtime prayer each night for years: "Help me not to have any good dreams, any bad dreams, no dreams at all." Being a wildish dreamer myself, I can only imagine the confusion of not knowing for sure if you're awake or asleep, dreaming or not.

But today his long-ago question about the other side of the world came to mind as I listened to a man speak about the relevance of Jesus: "What does someone who lived 2,000 years ago, 2,000 miles away have to do with us?" he asked before brilliantly exploring his own question. I remembered the day Tim, still a preschooler, posed his other-side-of-the-world question for the last time. He had been following our friend Marty around our back yard, arms extended in a physical request to be picked up--no doubt preferring, as we all do, to see the face rather than the legs of the person we're talking to. Kind-hearted Marty picked him up, and Tim pointed to what he could see of South Mountain, always in view from our house, and asked,"Is that the other side of the world?" Marty hadn't heard the question before but replied, saying he thought the other side of the world was probably in that direction. Marty's answer seemed to satisfy the little boy.

Not long after, Tim shared with us what he knew of the Good Friday and Easter story. Simply put, it's about when Jesus "died on the other side of the world." We didn't realize until that moment that Tim's question had to do with putting something very important into some kind of perspective.** Apparently neither time nor distance posed a problem for the story's relevance to Tim: he simply needed to be pointed in the general direction.

*While I'm not going into who Mr. N. is here, he deserves his own story and most likely will have it. He played and continues to play a big part in our family story. That he did play such a big part was most likely not part of his life plan. 


**As I wrote this I remembered a few other similar questions posed. My brother at the same age asked repeatedly, "Is that a corn field?" whenever we drove past farmlands. My parents wondered if perhaps he was a budding botanist or farmer. And then one day he prayed for missionaries in the cornfields (a misunderstanding of the frequent prayer in our church that God would help the missionaries in the foreign fields). My parents realized his interest was "what the heck are missionaries and what are they doing in cornfields?" When my sister-in-law was young she repeatedly proclaimed that she wanted to be a missionary. The reason, she explained later, was because she thought that the ushers who passed the offering plates were the missionaries and that they got to keep the money they collected. I would imagine that buried beneath what we think we know are similar questions.