Many of you parents are probably familiar with the popular Laura Numeroff stories, such as If You Give a Pig a Pancake and If You Give a Moose a Muffin. I found their fun, light-hearted tone helpful in processing a morning episode at our house recently…

If you give a Ben a permanent dry erase marker, he’s going to draw on something with it. So you will let him draw on the easel in the kitchen. While you are in the kitchen you will see a stack of papers that belong in the study. So you will take them up there to keep your counters nice and clean. While you are up in the study, you will remember the several emails you received yesterday that you did not reply to. You will decide to take two minutes and reply to some right then so as to not put it off any longer. Two minutes will turn into fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes is a long time for a one year old to draw only on an easel, so he will find other items to draw on. The living room carpet provides a lot of open space for drawing. And chances are- if he finds a big something like the living room carpet to draw on… he’s going to use his permanent dry erase markers on it.

Several things might be going through your head right now, like, “Sarah, he’s 22 months old. Why would you give him a permanent marker to begin with?” or “Fifteen minutes? You can’t leave a toddler alone with so much as a twinkie for fifteen minutes without devastation and destruction. What did you expect?” I know. These are valid points. Who can explain some of the decisions we make? But anyhow, this was an especially frustrating situation to me, in part because we are in the process of selling our house and I have been working more diligently than usual to keep it clean, and I’m pretty sure most realtors would say blue and green artwork on the carpet doesn’t “show well.” Where on earth am I going with this? And an even more pressing question in some of your minds- did I get the marker out?? I hate to turn this into a suspense story, but I’ll get to the second question in a minute. God used this episode in our morning to reveal a little bit about the state of my heart. As I was passionately cleaning the carpet (for a really long time), it struck me, “This is the most passionate I have felt about anything all morning.” Really?? Carpet??? When I came down the stairs and saw the colorful streaks on the carpet, it lit my fuse internally more than anything my boys had done all week. They disobey- I impose a consequence. They fight with each other- I give them the love- each-other talk. They whine and complain- it’s irritating. But my one year old colors on my carpet, and I am fired up!
Maybe I could just chalk it up to me having an off day. But then the Lord reminded me that just a few days earlier I had lost my temper when I walked into the guest bedroom to find that all three boys had taken the room apart and turned it upside down. Not out of destructive defiance or something, mind you. They did it in order to build their “snuggle home” (a small dwelling place made out of everything in the room.) But nonetheless, I snapped at them without taking a moment to think. My husband had to get in my face a little about it that night, “Sarah, it’s a snuggle home.” Seriously, when snuggle homes and colored carpet are the most serious crimes at your house, something is out of line in your heart. When I am more passionate about my kids keeping their room clean than I am about them loving each other, something is tragically twisted. (And I would never say that I am, but we know actions are always more indicative of the heart than words.)
So for me, this episode was God’s vehicle to correct my priorities… to remind myself what matters, what matters most and what doesn’t even make the list. What good does it do to get marker stains out of your carpet (and I did) if you leave your child’s heart stained with a warped view of what really matters in life?

NEXT STEPS
Evaluating Priorities
Ask the Lord to show you where the true priorities of your heart are and what you are modeling for your kids. Ask your spouse, your community group or your kids, if they are old enough, where they see your priorities in your actions.
TIME OUT – 6.09

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Time Out for Parents . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.