forgiveness and stealing

A couple of nights ago Jet and I were horsing around and he decided that he wanted to play the stealing game.

"The stealing game?" I asked. "Yeah," says Jet, "here you steal this" he throws me a widget, "and I'll steal this," picking up another.

"Do you know what stealing is?" I asked, perhaps concerned that he was showing criminal tendencies so openly and so young.

"No."

I went on to explain that it wasn't exactly "cool" to be stealing...

Later we were watching Avatar and Aang was talking about forgiveness. "What's forgiveness?" Jet asks.

This one was a little tougher than explaining stealing, but since we were watching TV, I made up an example of our TV breaking, so we took the neighbor's TV without asking permission, and they weren't even home when we took it. But they found out.

So we had to deal with resulting fall out, anger, resentment, police, jail, etc. But then in the end, our neighbor forgave us, and we were able to live in peace with our neighbors again. I'm sparing many details, but that was a tough conversation. Needless to say, our almost 4 year old lost interest about half way through...