Who are you ?

As a parent of two, I often find myself asking "Who are you?" Could you possibly be my offspring? Did I really create this creature? Most of the time I am not asking this out of the best of situations but from the "challenging times" as a parent. And most of the time the conclusion is, "nope, they are my wife Julie's kids, not mine!"

But, one of the joys as a parent are the times that our children do or say something that makes us stop in our tracks, and think "Wow!". I recently had one of those with my twelve year old son Tyler. Tyler was recently given a writing assignment at school, and was asked to answer the following question, in paragraph form of course.

Question: Where is a place that I am perfectly happy?

Here was his answer...

"Church is not exactly an exciting or interesting place to a lot of people, and most choose to avoid it. There are even laws in schools encouraging us to avoid church and religion. But here from the very table where I am writing this, is a place that I never have fear, never saddened, never angered, never forgotten, and for sure never bored. The holy place of which I speak is Fellowship Church of Grapevine Texas. In this place of which numbers are now over 18,000 a weekend, there is fun and excitement in song, games, message, faith, and love that no one could even imagine without seeing and experiencing..."

I picked this up and read it, and then I had to sit down and read it again. Could this possibly be the same child that I have to remind daily to stop making vulgur noises and that the couch is not the launching pad for his next destination? At twelve I was appreciating the many wonderful flavors of Hubba Bubba bubble gum and consumed with the planning of how to obtain the next game for my Atari game system. Never with such deep thought and with any appreciation of my surroundings or what I had been given.

Often times I think we look down at children and have the mentality of they could never understand the big picture or they are just to young to understand so many things. This is a huge reminder to me of how Christ viewed and spoke of children in scripture and that we should never underestimate their thought, understanding, or spiritual maturity.