Business is picking up.

NicholasMy grandson Nicholas has always been aces at picking up toys. When Katy and Hans say, “It’s time to tidy up,” he jumps right to it without resisting. When I commented to Katy about that, she said, “Oh, he actually likes to tidy up, so much so that he sometimes tries to put away toys the other children are still playing with.”

Now that Nicholas is almost 5, he’s become a pick-up professional, someone who appreciates order and experiences stress when things are chaotic.

A few weeks ago, when I was visiting him and his family in England, Katy decided to make a bold move. In the weeks since baby Andrew had arrived, the 3 giant toy bins had become messy. (Of course Nicholas had kept his toys separate from that disarray, storing his favorites in special places.)

Toy re-orgSo, when Katy announced a re-org, dumping all 3 bins on the living room carpet, Nicholas was thrilled with the prospect of putting everything back in order. His siblings, too, enjoyed the process, finding toys they’d “lost” long ago.

 

But then Katy threw them a curve ball. “We have more toys than we need,” she said, “so as we tidy up, we’re going to set aside some of them for children who don’t have very many.”

Little brows furrowed, and enthusiasm went down a notch, but Katy pushed forward. “Let’s start by making a pile of cars and trucks for our friend Sam. He has very few boy-toys, since he only has sisters.”

Objections came quickly. “But those are mine,” one said. “Let’s give Sam different ones instead.” Deciding which ones was complicated, and so Katy had to gently insist.

All young parents want their children to hold possessions lightly, gradually learning that everything belongs to God. But reluctance to give away what’s “ours” is common among children. Actually, the same holds true for adults. When presented with an opportunity to share, we often have to play a game of tug-o-war in our heads before we can make it happen.

Of course God knows this, which is why he asks (and sometimes insists) we part with things. And it’s not always just things.

Sometimes God asks us to part with people we love, giving them over to him. When this happens, he’s trying to make the same point with us that parents make with children: hold everything lightly and acknowledge that all of it belongs to God. That even includes “our” people, an exceedingly difficult lesson to learn.

Everything fits...As for Nicholas, in the end he rallied and got into the spirit of giving toys away. But the day wasn’t only about giving; he received something that day, too: 3 organized toy bins with enough room to neatly close their lids…. a great satisfaction to him.

 “Don’t store up treasures here on earth….  Store your treasures in heaven….  Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.” (Matthew 6:19-2)

Honestly….

In recent weeks, Louisa, Birgitta, Emerald, and I have made friends with a friendly critter who lives on our front porch, a handsome toad we named Terrence.

TerrenceEvery evening at about 9:00, Terrence appears in the same corner of the porch, only a few inches from where we step in and out of the house. As we’ve passed, time after time, he’s never flinched, even at Jack’s dangerously close paws that are as big as he is. And in the morning, Terrence is always gone.

Late one night as we stepped past Terrence to walk Jack, I asked Louisa, “What is it about the corner of our porch that brings him back night after night?”

“The bug-buffet, Mom.”

Of course she was right. Frogs and toads love bugs, and our porch light brought an ongoing, yummy supply for Terrence. Though we never saw him nab one, we knew he was.

Ready to depart.As much as we enjoyed our tenacious toad, we had reason to believe his days at the buffet were numbered. After our encounter with a brown recluse spider last week, we enlisted the help of a pest control service scheduled to arrive with potent chemicals soon, though Terrence didn’t know it.

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All of us are familiar with the old adage, “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” It’s ready justification for withholding information from, say, an accident report, or an information resource, or a courtroom testimony. Another example might be a good cook who’s asked to share a recipe. She purposely leaves out one ingredient so another cook’s finished product won’t taste as good as hers.

But the old adage isn’t really true; what someone doesn’t know can hurt him. Even in the case of withholding an ingredient, which seems silly, two people get hurt: the first cook who compromises her integrity for selfish gain, and the second, whose recipe fails, making her doubt the first cook’s honesty.

God has a strong opinion about people who wink at lying. For instance, lying is referred to twice in a list of seven things that are “detestable” to him. (Proverbs 6:17,19) He also pits lying against truth, saying those who lie are choosing the devil over him. Satan has no truth in him (John 8:44), and Jesus is the truth (John 14:6).

He challenges us to behave more like him than the devil, choosing a high standard of telling “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” The reason is important: to reflect the Creator in whose image we’re made. Secondly, he wants to spare us and others from unnecessary hurt.

Porch lightAs for Terrence, the honest, whole-truth thing to do was let him know harsh chemicals were coming, and his best option was to relocate. So we scooped Terrence into a box and drove him to the far corner of our subdivision, gently placing him in a bush near another lighted porch with another delectable bug buffet.

Bon appétit, Terrence!

“Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment.”  (Proverbs 12:19)

Really? No rules?

No rulesMy sister, brother and I grew up in a house with very few rules. Actually, I can’t think of even one. Our mom operated at the extreme end of lenient, and of course we kids were happy about that.

Recently I wondered if my advanced age might not have tilted the truth on that, so I asked Mary. Since she’s 2 years ahead of me, her childhood memories are inevitably more accurate than mine.

“No,” she said, thinking back. “I can’t remember a single rule.”

Not having any rules didn’t mean Mom wasn’t teaching us. For example, I recall one moment when I was 11 and had developed the sloppy bathroom habit of stuffing wet towels into the towel bar in a ball-like wad. Then one day Mom walked in just as I was stuffing.

Rather than chide me, she took the towel out of the bar, shook it out, and said, “I’ll be interested to visit your house some day when you’re an adult. All your bathroom towels will be wet balls.”

Neatly hung towelShe then carefully looped the towel over the bar, running her hand the length of it for extra smoothness. I stood there studying her work and realized for the first time why my towels had always been damp. But something else more important happened, too. I felt badly about stuffing my towel, because I’d been a disappointment to Mom.

Many years later I asked her, “Why didn’t you ever give us a list of rules or punish us when we did things badly?”

Her answer revealed her parenting philosophy. “Once you knew the right thing to do, I knew you’d do it…. because you loved me.”

Hmmmm.

I’ve often felt that same way toward God, wanting to please him with my daughter-behavior. When I fail, it impacts me greatly because of how much I love him. It’s interesting that after God set out 10 commands for his children to obey, Jesus condensed them into 2, both based on acting in love in response to his love for us. Maybe Mom had something there.

Nate and I raised our children with rules, insisting on regular chores, compulsory church attendance, spankings for defiant behavior, etc. Maybe we had to do it because there were so many of them. Or maybe the difference between our rules and Mom’s lack of them was that she was a kid-at-heart and we weren’t.

In any case, years after my towel-hanging exchange with Mom, I had acquired some bathroom towel bars of my own. And when she came to visit Nate and I, she always found neatly hung towels drying nicely.

Towels hooksBut then 7 children joined us, requiring endless towel-hanging exchanges with them that were no fun to have. So we finally eliminated the whole problem. We took down the towel bars and hung 7 hooks.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind and….  Love your neighbor as yourself….  The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)