My Friend Tyler, the Doctrinal Demon

Since my last post where I complained about my son's lack of enthusiasm for All Things Church, I decided I could have it a lot worse. After all, my kid could be Tyler.

This is my friend Tyler. He is 3 3/4. He's incredibly precocious, has quite the flair for the dramatic, and is constantly trying to entice my son to the "dark slide" (the enclosed tube slide at the park). Don't worry, though. Jake steadfastly refuses.

Tyler also has a knack for posing difficult doctrinal questions, hence this post.

His mother was trying to explain to him why they couldn't stop to get ice cream on the way to church—because it's the Sabbath, which means it is a day of rest. Tyler thinks about this for a minute, and then: "So, when we go to church, Jesus is asleep." (This solution resolved another burning question he had: why doesn't he ever see Heavenly Father or Jesus at church? Now he knows.)

Once while Jake and I were out and about with Tyler and his mom, the boys had the good fortune to get their hands on some lollipops. When Tyler begged his mom for a second lollipop, and after she told him no, he quietly went off by himself, folded his arms, and began to pray: "Heavenly Father, can you please help my mommy to be nice? I want another sucker. Amen."

His mom told me that this was a common occurrence, and she has also heard the following variations:
"Heavenly Father, can you please come to this Earth and make my mom be nice. Amen."
And when his pleas seemed to go unheard...
"Heavenly Father, you need to try hard, hard, hard, harder to make my mommy be nice and to make her listen to me."

His Sunbeam teachers gave everyone in the class two goldfish to take home. One of Tyler's died almost immediately (of course) and he was very upset by it. He was even more upset when his mom wanted to flush it down the toilet. Because, as he tried to explain to his mom, he needed "to keep it so that Heavenly Father could resurrect it" and repeatedly prayed for Heavenly Father to resurrect the fish right now.

He also thinks that Santa Claus and Heavenly Father live together, even though his mother denies it (even though it sort of makes sense).

Jake isn't so tough to deal with, after all. Amen.