Overflowing with…
What I am about to tell you may shock you, but I swear it is true. We recently took our three boys to a pizza/play restaurant for the first time. Yes, five years into having kids and we have never made a visit to the Mecca of the Great Mouse. Despite this our kids still speak of him with great familiarity as “Chuck E. Cheese, proud sponsor of PBS kids.” (TV time cut in half now.) Anyhow, we still have never seen Chuck, as our recent visit was to his good friend Peter. Peter Piper to be precise. Let me tell you how amazing this adventure was…
There was no special reason for this wondrous treat. It was just a plain old Tuesday night turned into magic family fun time. They were rescued from the cauliflower and red lentils on my menu for the evening, so that they might feast on pizza. And when their cheese pizza mistakenly came out with mushrooms on it, did they have to eat it? No! Did they even have to pick the mushrooms off? No, because although I assured the kind pizza chef that we would be happy to pick them off, he still made them a new cheese pizza anyway. The night was everything it should be at a place like that… Glittering tokens. Precious pink tickets. The most unsafe game of skee ball I have ever witnessed, whereby skee balls were launched into surrounding game machines, as well as ricocheting back on us so violently that we barely escaped without head trauma. I am trying to tell you, these were GOOD times, people. And of course, there was the grand finale, when the boys eagerly traded in their tickets for inexplicable things, asking first for some outrageous item like a remote control helicopter. But upon finding out their 44 tickets didn’t quite cover the 10,000 needed, they settled happily on a two inch tall purple ninja which, after all, is “what they’ve always wanted!”
So you might be thinking, “Wow, Sarah, with all that unmerited wonder and amazingness, I bet your kids showered you with ‘thank yous’ til you could hardly stand it.” I’ll admit, I actually was subconsciously expecting to get a little bit of royal treatment from our boys, so imagine my disappointment on our way home when our three year old said, “What are we going to do when we get home? Can it at least be something fun?” I’m sorry, were we just scrubbing toilets or were we not in the seventh level of his personal heaven? And instead of overflowing gratitude the response was pretty much just “I’m ready for more.” Well. My husband did a very admirable job of explaining why the last several hours had supplied us with more than adequate fun for the evening, while I resisted the urge to launch into a “do-you-know rant.” You probably know what I mean… DO YOU KNOW how many kids would love to blah blah blah? DO YOU KNOW how much mommy and daddy did for you blah blah blah? The do-you-know rant is one of my more obnoxious and ineffective parenting techniques. Do I really think my three year old can know the scope of his extravagant abundance relative to most children in the world? Can he know the extent to which his mom and dad have reordered the entirety of their lives to accommodate his physical, spiritual and emotional needs? And in reflecting on the incident and my urge for a do-you-know rant, the Lord reminded me of some important things.
First, there’s the absolute reality that “DO YOU KNOW…” will never set me and my child up for meaningful, edifying conversation, what with it being so hard for them to hear anything over the noise of my superiority complex. But there’s also this fundamental flaw: the do-you-know rant presumes certain knowledge would have produced corresponding actions. But the Bible says, “out of the overflow of the HEART, the mouth speaks” – not out of the overflow of the mind. Paul’s teaching in Romans 1 is consistent with this principle. He talks of those who KNOW the truth, but instead of ordering their lives according to it, they simply suppress it so that they can carry out the desires of their dark hearts. So the “DO YOU KNOW” rant is both ineffective from a communication standpoint and flawed in its very premise.
But this is only where the Lord started with me. Of course, you know He got personal with it. He reminded me about my shopping trip several weeks ago when I bought a few things for myself. For the week that followed, do you know what preoccupied me? (Next stop, moment of embarrassing honesty.) I kept thinking how I would like to have several other new things as well. In a store seeing some pair of great boots or passing a woman with cute jeans, my thoughts went straight to, “I sure would like to have a pair of those too.” So as it turns out, I am still capable of impulses on par with the maturity of my three year old. I have so much!! But more would be nice. Gross.
So, I had to ask myself, “how much gratitude do my kids see me overflow with on a daily basis?” I don’t just mean the autopilot “thanks” when they clear their dinner plate from the table. I mean “overflowing with thankfulness” like Paul tells us to be in Colossians 2:7 because of the strength of our roots in Jesus. Not overflowing with things that make me comfortable. Not overflowing with the productivity of supermom. Overflowing with thankfulness. I want to overflow with thankfulness because I have tasted and seen the goodness of the Lord and know my refuge in Him brings incomparable blessing (Ps 34.8). And I want them to learn to live like that. I can teach my kids to say thank you, but that’s nothing more than manners. I think true thankfulness is pretty much a lost virtue in our culture. We, of all people, need to bring it back.
NEXT STEPS
Ask yourself and maybe even your spouse or kids questions like, What do I overflow with? How consistently do I express gratitude to others?
Consider starting a journal of things you are thankful for. Keep it in a place accessible to everyone so that each family member can enter their contributions throughout the next few weeks. Then spend time at your Thanksgiving meal reading it together.
An Opportunity to Connect and Worship with Your Kids!
Join us on Friday (tonight), November 20 from 7:00 – 8:30 pm for our first-ever, Watermark Family Ministry worship experience – LIVE! Grab the whole family and join us as we play, sing, have fun, worship and talk about finding hope in our relationship with God! Specially designed for kids Kindergarten – 5th grade, but all ages are encouraged to attend! Registration and details are available at at watermark.org
If you have preschool children, have you signed up to receive the Starting Blocks PlayBook? It’s an easy way to build on what they are learning at church on Sundays with projects and activities you can do together with other moms or just with your kids at home. Sign up online by checking the PlayBook box HERE
TIME OUT – 11.09
