Sweet Moments!

Today, we received the December edition of The Friend Magazine that is published by our church for children (ages 0 -12 or so). The last couple of months, whenever we get this magazine, reading the stories from it replaces books for Sarah in the evening as she's so excited to read it and color some of the pictures in it. Anyway, tonight I was reading the story titled "The Language of Dance" on p. 32 (not linkable online yet because it's not December yet, so they don't have the electronic version of this edition). It's a sweet story. Anyway, as I was reading Nathan was being his distracting self... making noises and such. I could tell Sarah was really trying to listen to the story but was having a hard time. The interesting thing was that I would typically just hurry through this, regardless of Nathan's noises, so I could get them to bed. But tonight, for some reason, I asked Nathan several times to be quieter so Sarah could hear. Then I rearranged the seating so Sarah could hear better. Then I went back a little in the story and read what she might have missed during Nathan's commotion. When I finished the story, I looked over and was surprised to see that it looked like Sarah might have been a little teary-eyed. I asked her how she felt and she said "good". I asked if she had cried and she said, in a sweeter than usual tone, "yeah Dad, but it was a happy cry". I asked her if this was the first time she had had a cry like that and she said "yes". I I asked her what she was feeling inside and she said she felt "love" and, after a brief pause, "good". I told her that I knew that that good and love feeling that she felt inside of her was the Holy Ghost. I asked her why she had felt like that and she said that the girls in the story had made the right choice and that they were good friends. It was a really neat experience and I told her that I was proud of her for listening to and feeling the Spirit and that I knew that she could make similar choices in her life.
I love sweet experiences and moments like this where your child learns something that, developmentally, they may not have been at a point where they could make sense of those experiences yet.
This particular situation is one that I've struggled to explain to her over the last couple of years. She's frequently asked, when she's seen me or Mary or someone speaking at Church shed tears of joy, why we/they are crying if they are happy. I've tried to explain it, but I haven't really been able to do it in a way that made sense to her as crying has always been coupled with sad/upset/painful feelings in her experience. But she learned the difference between those kinds of feelings and those kinds of tears tonight! We love you Sarah!