My daughter, Hannah, posted the following last week. Several of you said you could already anticipate the upcoming blog post. So scroll down for the points well-taken from this little lament.
The most precious thing just happened. I was in my room and I heard Eliza calling me. I went to her in the kitchen and she was holding a petal that had fallen from my flowers in the vase. She said, “Mama, I need you to put this back on the flowers.”
I said, “Well, I can’t. It fell off.”
She responded, “But it needs to be in the water.”
I explained, thinking this wasn’t a big deal, “Well when petals fall off, they die….We have to just throw this one away.”
I went back to my breakfast-cooking and, in a minute, I heard sniffling. I looked over at her and big tears were streaming down her baby face. I immediately went to her and asked what was wrong. She was still holding the petal, and wailed softly, “I DON’T WANT IT TO DIE!”
- Young children give us multiple daily opportunities to put the Word in them. We have to be opportunity-alert (Deuteronomy 6:4-6).
- Young children think their mothers can do anything, even restore petals to the bloom. Therefore, the responsibility to show them Christ is a huge one (2 Timothy 1:5).
- Physical life requires water. Spiritual life requires living water. We have no hope without the water (John 4:1-15).
- What is significant to our children is just as important to them as what’s significant to us adults is important to us. Unselfish parenting makes unselfish adult children (Luke 18:16).
- Sometimes we can be dismissive of someone’s grief. We fail to realize the hurt is continuing in hearts right beside us (Romans 12:15).
- Sometimes we cook, or clean or scroll on a device through the most teachable moments of our kids’ lives (Proverbs 127:3-5).
- Death is a natural phenomenon. But God meant for us to see the urgency demanded by the brevity of life. He used grass and petals and vapor to illustrate this. Evangelism’s opportunities are in the lessons of this petal. We should be constantly thinking, speaking, working for souls around us: “I don’t want it to die.” We should be getting them to the water of life (James 1:11; 4:14).
- Sometimes, a child needs a few minutes of explanation, when the quick version seems very sufficient to us parents. That’s why quantity time is so very important. We don’t know when those moments may occur, but they are time-sensitive (Deut. 4:9).
Now, in case anyone thinks I am postulating that Han is a dismissive, scrolling, uninvolved parent, that cannot be further from truth. She’s one of the most involved parents I know. It’s just that God is good to give all of us little reminders of the important in the midst of the chaotic urgent. I needed this little reminder.
Yesterday was my Dad’s 95th birthday. It is hard to believe that he lived in an era in which an automobile was a very rare sight in his community, but then traveled the world during World War Two in a ship called the San Saba. When he was a small lad, he disassembled a radio to try and find the “people” who were “talking in there”. Now he asks us how that tiny phone can possibly contain the answers to any and all questions we ask Siri. He owns the bell and a wooden desk from that one-room schoolhouse in Peaceburg, where he attended when he didn’t have to be in the fields picking cotton (or hiding under the cotton basket so he wouldn’t have to pick). But then he went on to be one of the first in his family, if not the first, to graduate from college. It’s hard to believe he grew up as one of eleven children, a sharecropper’s son, and now he is the single remaining person of that generation of family. He watched the world take flight, man travel to the moon, the building of interstates and infrastructures and internet, as well as the destruction of the Nazi Regime and the Soviet Union. Ironically, he served in a huge worldwide war against injustice in the 1940s while blinking his eyes in 1973 and opening them to the injustice that would take millions more lives than all of the wars in which the US has ever been involved. 