I may have had too many kids. I’m not quite sure what to do about it, and couldn’t tell you which one I would vote off the island, but I’m just saying this past week I felt like I may have had too many.
Somewhere between the start of baseball and the unending lists of spelling words, bad habits snuck in and the kids’ Bible was sitting in the corner too often as the lights were turning out for the night. We needed to recalibrate a bit.
It was time to try again. I took out our Storybook Bible and tried everything I could think of: reading while the kids brushed their teeth; standing; sitting with the youngest pinned on my lap…and then threw in the towel. The fight to create a stable pattern was real.
One night, with Samantha sitting on the stairs leading to the boys’ room and each of her three brothers in bed, we started again from the very beginning, reading the Storybook Bible’s version of Adam and Eve. We looked at the pictures and I asked who we should listen to, God or the snake. We all collectively “booed” at the snake, and as I turned the page, my three-year-old Teddy yelled, “Oh, darn it!” and pointed to Eve taking a bite of the apple.
While “darn it” doesn’t reflect the ideal language I would hope for out of his little mouth, what it does show is that he got it. He felt the disappointment. As God Himself must have been saying, “Noooooo” when Eve took her first bite, in his three-year-old understanding, Teddy felt the fall of mankind.
And what I see in his reaction is the graciousness of God: His goodness to speak to the hearts of my kids, even when I felt my “trying” could be done so much better.
It is God that lifts up the story from the page and elicits a heart that is captured by the story. When a child can see so much more than just the apple and feel the disappointment of the Fall, it is only God.
So in the busy of May, try again. Fight for the patterns that have worked for you in the past but you have gotten away from. Try what you have heard are good ideas but have not found the space for. Then plead your heart out that the truths of God would hit the hearts of the kids you so dearly love. God may break through in the smallest of spaces, in the boldest of ways.
Let’s keep trying and trying again.
