Lasting Joy from Love

For several years now, gentle reader, one of my favorite Biblical passages has been Romans 5:6-11. There are a number of reasons for this. But first, let me tell you a couple of stories.

Several months ago, I instituted a weekly policy of taking a different child out for breakfast each week. It worked well for about 33 minutes, at which point I started having cops show up at my door at inconvenient hours investigating complaints that some weirdo was forcing cheap restaurant breakfasts down the throats of various neighborhood children every Wednesday. It was then that I began contemplating in typically deep fashion the legal expedience of limiting this weekly activity to my own children. This was a marvelous plan, I thought. Now I could finally feel as though I was fulfilling my role as father in the lives of my children while still doing everything pretty much the same as before; conscience appeasement is a sad, sad phenomenon. Anyway, this enabled me to see my kids once a week (o.k., o.k.--one of my kids once a week), while the remainder of the week was still spent in a galaxy far, far away--well, school and work anyway, though Odin knows it takes about as long to get to and from school on a typical day as it would take me to get to and from a galaxy far, far away. Still, at least once a week would I be able to keep contact with a member of my family.

In keeping with this plan, then, I one Wednesday took my daughter to Country Kitchen for the weekly ritual. An egg allergy prevented her from being able to get anything other than oatmeal for her morning repast. Still, she seemed to enjoy it, so whatever. Well, on this particular Wednesday, after a waiting session of coloring and playing games ("Let's see how many people we can hit with these little paper wads before they realize it's us!" "Yeah! That'll be fun!" "Sir, if you don't stop this immediately, we'll have to ask you to leave." "It wasn't me...really. It was my daughter! I can't do anything with her!" "Sir, I personally saw you launch that last wad..."), our food arrived, and we commenced to eating. Now, normally my daughter is quite a talkative little girl, interjecting comments at the most inopportune times ("Daddy, it wasn't either me!"), but this particular Wednesday the gentle ministrations of starvation prevented our speaking more than absolutely necessary for the first couple of minutes after receiving our food. By "absolutely necessary," of course, I mean that the only thing I heard in that first couple of minutes was a "Daddy, that's my food; stop stealing it."

Anyway, after a couple of minutes, my daughter looked up at me and said, with that completely serious intellectualism attainable only by a four-year-old, "Sometimes I call my brain a tire." Now, this is a completely normal observation to make, right? Of course! Naturally, my reaction was a half-choked "What?!?" To this, my ever contemplative four-year-old daughter explained: "Yes. Like 'My oatmeal is going to make my tire fall out of my head.'" In typical fashion, she then re-attacked her oatmeal with a gusto I have seldom seen rivaled. I don't know where she gets this stuff...

The second incident happened about two days later and involved my third child, who was not quite two at the time. He had just recently taken to going everywhere with a large doll, whom he had named "Joe" and on whose poor, bald head had been scribbled many a line (in permanent ink, of course). Well, my wife was walking down our hallway past the open bathroom door, when some movement from the corner of her eye caused her to turn back to the bathroom. Sure enough, there was my son, holding Joe by the ankle and systematically dunking his head in the toilet. I mean, how else are you going to clean off permanent ink stains? Well? How? He looked up when my wife came in, and then proceeded to dunk Joe yet again. (Thankfully, the toilet was not in that state between using and flushing. At least, I hope not.) My wife grabbed Joe from his little fist and asked, "Do babies go in the toilet?" He looked up at her in wide-eyed wonderment (probably wondering how she could possibly not know the obvious answer to that question) and responded in one of those voices that goes up and then down, "Ye-e-e-e-e-e-s." Of course. How could we have ever thought otherwise?

What is the point of all this, you ask? In particular, what could this possibly have to do with Romans 5:6-11? I'm glad you asked...even if you didn't ask and couldn't care less. Ah, once again the joys of one-sided conversation. The point is simply this: incidents such as those above are among those things that make you realize just how much you love your children. Nothing can ever take the place of one of these precious gifts. No other gift of God is quite so adept at showing you just how undeserving and woefully inadequate you are, either. But for our discussion today, suffice it to say that laughter shook my belly like a bowl full of jelly that day. (And it does shake like a bowl full of jelly, let me tell you. Santa? Santa's got nothing on me...) In addition to making me a wee bit healthier (or so I've been told), these were two particular moments in which just how much I have been blessed in my four children was impressed upon me. It's really quite impossible to put into words the overwhelming nature of the love I have for my children, but these experiences drove that home--you know, to the point that you find it hard to swallow or even to breathe. God then utilized these moments to impress upon me the magnitude of the truth contained in Romans 5:6-11. (I told you we'd get back to this eventually.) In what way? Well, I just realized how long this thing has gotten, so the answer to that will have to wait until next week. Man, my readership is going to hate me before too much longer...Why, oh why can't I be less full of hot air? And, perhaps more importantly, how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know.