Kids

“The children almost broken by the world become the adults most likely to change it.”
― Frank Warren

     When I was a kid, I was a brat.  Actually there are a few people who still refer to me as a brat.  I would pick on somebody bigger than me and then run to my dad.  I would sit next to him with my arm flung over his leg for extra protection from the person I had just made angry.  I thought I was pretty smart, but as my kids got older and they would sit down next to me and then look over their shoulder, I always asked, "What did you do?"  They each had a nickname,  The oldest was "We".  When ever "we" needed to do something it meant he needed to do something.  Next in line was "Somebody".  Usually "Somebody" ate the last cookie.  And the little one was "Nobody".  Whenever anything bad happened and I asked who did it, she piped up, "Nobody".  But it happened.
     Having kids makes you rethink everything you ever did as a child and as your parents prayed that your kids would act just as you did, you prayed they didn't.  My son was in the D.A.R.E. program in the fifth grade.  It was a drug awareness program.  They were nice enough to teach my son that cigarettes are a drug.  When I stopped at a store to get a pack of cigarettes and my son wanted a fancy pen for school, I told him, "Not this time."  I had limited cash on me and did not want to write a check.  As we neared the car in the parking lot, he yelled, "If you didn't spend all your money on drugs I could have a pen for school."  As the old lady at the next car looked over her glasses at me, all I could do was smile, as I said some words to him quietly and shoved him in the car.
     Like their mother, all three of my kids have a sense of humor and love a good practical joke. My son always yelled, "The lights red." at a stop light.  Nobody yells a light is red, so I assumed it was green and would start to accelerate before it sunk into my brain that the light was red.  He liked to look at my feet while I was driving and say, "What was that?"  because he knew I had a fear of mice and that would be my first thought.  Automatically my feet came up and who knew how long it would be before I could force them back on the peddles.  He also liked to ask me if I heard something crack, whenever we were on a humongous bridge.  "We" thought "we" were so funny.
     My second child had a totally different sense of humor.  Always with a perfectly straight face, she would make some outrageous claim.  Sitting at a stop light, she suddenly burst out with, "That old man just flipped me off."  I looked over to see a shriveled up man of about 140 years old who could barely see over the wheel, who I wasn't even sure was breathing as he stared forward snoring as he waited for the light to change.  "This guy right here?"
     "Yes, that old man."
     How dare he sit there like he was not guilty.  Just before I got out of the car to go have a little conversation with him, I asked one more time, "This old man flipped you off?"
     "No, but what if he did?"  
     She was lucky she was in the back seat where I could not reach her.
     Another time, when the nickname "Crackhead" was popular and you didn't need to do anything but breathe to earn the name, she told me that the principle had pulled her into his office to ask if I had a problem, because he had overheard her call me "Crackhead."  After a few minutes of enjoying my horror in thinking I had been labeled by all the school officials, she let me know she made it up.
     The youngest, who must have needed me, laughed with me, instead of trying to give me a heart attack with her practical jokes.
     My girls mellowed out, but my son he went through a streak of practical jokes that I could only laugh about after he had left the room.  Like offering to tow an old man on a tractor and laying the chain on the tractor instead of actually hooking it up and then taking off like a bat out of hell, while the old man braced himself for the jerk of the chain (that never came)  He chained his grandpa's truck to a pole and laughed until he was weak while grandpa tried to figure out why the truck wouldn't move.
     So now it doesn't sound so bad when I tell you I did things like spring rabbit traps and then run to dad.  I remember one time when I realized sitting by dad was not stopping the angered foe from attacking, so I quickly spilled my guts about whatever I did and dad laughed, but protected me.  I didn't realize then how right I was.
     I'm still doing it.  I mess up, doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, or just plain making someone mad or running from sin or the enemy.  Sometimes I don't run to the Father as fast as I should.  I spit out the admission of guilt and though He usually doesn't laugh, He puts an arm around me and keeps me safe.  I do have to face some consequences, make apologies, and ask Him to help me change, but I'm not afraid of Him anymore.

"The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But ... the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'" - Martin Luther King Jr.