Fond Memories

"children of God"

1 John 3:1

When my Amazing Boy was 5 years old, his sister, my Awesome Girl, was in 3rd grade.  She was not home-schooled at the time (she was school-schooled, you understand) and her school was competing with several other schools in the area, to practice public speaking.  Each student had to memorize a passage of Scripture, or a poem, or one of Aesop's fables.  Then they performed them for their class, and then two from each class (or each grade, I forget) competed against their grade-level equivalents from the other participating schools.  Well, this whole process lasted a few months.  They had several weeks to practice for their class, and then more weeks, to keep practicing before the inter-school competition.  So naturally, Awesome Girl had to practice saying her piece (a fable) several times a day, every day.

And, before we knew it, Amazing Boy had memorized her piece, too.  After she recited it to us, then he'd pipe up and recite it too.   Naturally, we got an enormous kick out of this.  The teacher that was running the competition was a friend of ours, so we shared with her that our son had memorized the piece simply from hearing his sister recite it so often.  She loved it too, and a few days before the competition, she asked Amazing Boy to recite it in front of the entire assembly.  He was scared, but he agreed.

When the day came, he bravely went up onstage, his big sister with him for moral support.  The teacher introduced him, and told him to go ahead when he was ready.

He took a deep breath...

... and broke out in the giggles.

So she helped him start again, he got one sentence spoken, tripped over one of his words, and began giggling again.

Naturally the crowd loved it.  There were probably five or six hundred people there, and they laughed along with him, and made little "awww" noises.   He false-started another couple of times, breaking up into adorable 5-year-old giggles, and then grabbed his sister's hand for courage.  That was what he needed, and he then spoke the whole piece nearly perfectly.   When he was all done, he ran offstage to the hearty applause of the audience, and into my arms.

I, of course, loved it.  Hubby and I were enormously proud of him.  Hubby had video-taped the whole thing, and I still have the video clip on my computer desktop.  Every once in awhile, I'll play it again, and six years later, I still love it.  It makes me laugh, and it makes me proud.   His courage, his perseverance, and the joy he has always exhibited, in good times and in hard times.  It's one of my favorite memories of his childhood.

But it's not one of his.  Recently we played a game where he had to tell his most embarrassing memory, and that was it.   I was so surprised, because there was really nothing he had to be embarrassed about.  A five year old, speaking in front of hundreds of people, being nervous, and those nerves manifesting themselves in giggling?  Completely understandable, right?  If you were there, you'd have found it charming, not embarrassing, right?  But he doesn't see it that way.

And I sometimes wonder if this is how God sees us.  We look back at times that were difficult for some reason, and those are not our fond memories.  Maybe they're embarrassing, maybe they're painful, but I think God just loves them.  He knows those are the times when we exhibited courage or boldness or perseverance or faith.  "Look at how much you grew," He might say to us, "I am so proud of you!"

It's so hard to change our perception of something.  When someone compliments us, it's hard to believe them, because we think we see it more accurately.  But that doesn't make us right.  And seeing things from His view is even harder.  I think that calls for faith.  We love a God of joy, compassion and forgiveness, whose desire is for us to grow.  We are His beloved, and He uses all things for good ~ even the things we think were bad.

~ "Behold, what manner of love 

the Father has bestowed on us, 

that we should be called children of God!" ~

1 John 3:1