Toddling and Tenebrous Thoughts

Another week is finishing up!  I know Sunday is technically our first day of the week, but really I don't consider it a new week until I have to tackle Monday.  This week has been challenging for various reasons but none of them have been especially noteworthy.  Just the regular heavy schedule, negative thinking, minor health problems, brief moments of beautiful calm, and fun snatches of time watching my kids grow up all thrown together.

This week S decided to venture into the world of toddling.  She took her first steps alone earlier this month, but this week she got brave enough to start walking all the way across the living room and crossing other vast distances!  She's still in that wobbling, staggering stage of walking and she frequently falls down so if she really wants to get somewhere fast, she drops down and scurries around on all fours.  (She is a very quick crawler.)    It's so much fun to watch her grow but scary also.  She's already showing signs of being a typical member of our family, as my sister Amy pointed out yesterday when S started pulling apart a potted plant at my parents' house.  More destruction headed my way, I guess.

B had her own foray into scary territory this week.  She's ventured a little into this before, but this week it was harder for me to help her cope with.  She came to me the other night with a great big frowny face and sad eyes and announced that she didn't belong on earth.  This completely baffled me.  Didn't belong on earth?  What??  I asked for a little clarification and she explained that she belongs with Satan.

With Satan????

Then the whole tortured story poured out.  She felt like she was a really bad person.  She moaned that she does so many wrong things, and she does the same wrong things over and over.  I tried to comfort her; I reminded her that Jesus had made up for all of our mistakes and she can repent of anything that is bothering her.  But she felt she has done too much wrong to repent of it all.  (At just barely 7 years old!  She's not even accountable for anything yet.)

So I decided to take it one step at a time, asking her to tell me what she had done that was bothering her.  She gave me a list-- she'd stolen lots of candy from my room (I knew about that), she'd drank Daddy's soda with K, she'd told lots of lies (I knew about some of these, but a bunch surprised me), she said she'd played roughly with S even when she knew it could hurt her, and that she'd hurt K on purpose.  We talked about saying sorry and making up for some of it (like paying for some of the candy and soda) and then she prayed to tell Heavenly Father she was sorry.  In the past this was always enough to make B feel better and then she cheers right up.  But not this time.

After we had gone through all this she was still crying and saying she was a bad person.  I probed further, trying to get an idea what was going through her head.  (I know well enough what demons your own negative thoughts can be, and what a relief it is when someone challenges them.)  She then revealed that when she does bad things she feels good inside and when she does good things she feels bad inside.  This one flummoxed me a bit.  I think I gave her some lame answer about not worrying about it, she's not a bad person and then we got interrupted by the other kids.

Still, now I know that thought is floating around in her head and the best way to drive it out of there is to help her confront it.  But I don't know how to tackle this one.  Does anybody have any ideas?  I really don't want my little girl making herself miserable over this!