Lessons Learned From Luke

Well today I babysat from 7 AM til around 7 PM. Twelve hours of babysitting which I don’t really mind because I really love kids. I find that every time I spend a lengthy period of time with any kid I learn something new. Today I learned a lot of things. Luke is so cute; he’s about 17 months old and a ball of unique, crazy, octopus color book loving, fun energy. His teaching started right off the bat. Right as Sabrina got in that car to leave he darted out the door and tried to chase the car. I mean he didn’t even blink he just started running after his mommy. Well I couldn’t let him do that… what kind of a babysitter would I be if I let my kid get run over by his mom’s car within the first 10 minutes? So I ran after him and picked him up, he was squirming and crying and shooting snot out of his nose so I took him back inside. He didn’t stop crying. Before I could even think about doing anything he was one the floor throwing a hardcore fit. Luckily I’m experienced in dealing with Luke fits. I just left him there, walked into the living room, and sat down in the chair. He continued his fit for about 5 minutes, but once he realized that no matter how much he cried mommy wasn’t coming back he came over to play with “tickle me Elmo.” I laughed, amazed at how easily this passionate fit of anger and devastation at being left behind quickly turned into a satisfied squeal at the fury red distraction. Immediately the unusual wheels in my head started turning. That’s how it is with us and God. We’re enjoying this awesome happy time that God has put into our life and then… it has to go. And we get so worked up we just run after Him and jump of the cliff of uncertainty and when we find that there’s no net we throw a little hissy fit. We just lie down and refuse to do anything but cry and pity ourselves and get mad at God. Then all of the sudden we realize… the fit isn’t changing anything. We pick ourselves back up, wipe our nose on our sleeve, and realize that happiness never really left… it just took a different form. Later we were reading the infamous “color book.” I’m not sure what is up with Luke’s weird obsession with this book but I’m pretty sure I had to “read” it to him like 37 times. Anyway, we were reading this book and it has these little sea creatures that match whatever color is on that page and they are kind of like puzzle pieces the way they are embossed in there. For some reason we always had to go from the back to the front which at first I couldn’t figure out. The last page is the blue octopus. That was Luke’s favorite because he could get it out and put it back in perfectly. He didn’t even want to go to any other page he just wanted to take that octopus in and out in and out over and over again. Well sometimes I can have some “OCD” tendencies and I really wanted us to go to other pages (that and I was tired of the dad gum octopus!). I finally convinced him, and we turned to the page with the yellow starfish. He tried to get it out, he pulled and pulled and he grunted at it but no matter what he did he couldn’t get that starfish out. Finally he looked up at me and sort of pointed to the page and started crying. So I reached over and in one swift motion, popped up the starfish. He stopped crying and gave a little giggle of approval as if to say, “That’s why I keep you around.” See the reason he only wanted to do the octopus is because he had done that one so much that it had become easy to get out on his own. What a perfect picture of what we as Christians tend to fall into. We get so comfortable living our little Christian lives of praying, reading our Bible, and going to church twice a week that we are afraid to move to the next page. It’s here at this next page that we face our starfish. We get to it and we struggle and fight and try everything we can think of to do it on our own and then finally we look up at God and realize our inadequacy. We cry out, “I can’t do this without you!’ and God says, “Ya, I know.” Then He reaches down and with one easy motion, He pops up the starfish. We really can’t do anything without Him. I guess that’s what makes Him God. All in all I learned quite a bit today, maybe I’ll take lessons from Luke more often.







2 Peter 2:9 (the message)
So God knows how to rescue the godly from evil trials. And he knows how to hold the feet of the wicked to the fire until Judgment Day