The Big Rubber Band

Some friends of ours were over last night - our children are close... their girl is 2 months and 2 days older than Ab and AA is one month and one day older than their son.

Their little man brought over a wide rubber band to show AA ... and left it.

Thus begins the adventure....

Tonight, we attempted to re institute two things -rather clumsily- with the children. Mom and I, in undiscussed agreement decided that tonight we would reinstate "bed-time". Until this year, we have maintained some reasonable bed-time limits during the summer months but of late our kids have run amok (well - sort of).

We set the time for 9 PM. So at about 9:10 PM the teeth had been hurriedly brushed and that other "before bed-time duty" had been completed. That was when I - unilaterally - decided to also reinstate Family Devotion.

We pray over and with our children each night but a couple years ago we began Family Devotion once per week. In the disorder of summer, this practice has pretty much fallen by the wayside.

So I called it. That was when AA chimed in that he wanted to do the Devotion.

Now this ambition and zeal would probably light up the hearts of most parents, but I was cautious.

You see, AA's devotions are sometimes not very spiritual. . . sometimes they get out of hand... sometimes Dad ends up getting really irritated and in need of some serious prayer time. I have tried to convince him to plan ahead for these things, but to no avail. He tends to leap headlong without much attention to where he will crash or to any other details for that matter (I wonder where he gets that).

So I could see this thing quickly getting off-point. So I set the timer on the microwave (5 minutes).

He ran to his room to scarf up some visuals.

And returned with that wide rubber band and a few sheets of note paper.

His first point hit me.

And while the others missed the mark a little, there was something to his first point.

As he attempted -Charles Atlas-Style -to stretch the rubber band to it's limit, he explained.

"This is God's love , see - it's unbreakable!"

He went on to say, it demonstrated His Son's love, too: "Unbreakable!"

My mind ran with that thought... How God's love stretches so far as is necessary to reach us. And then with the elasticity of a huge rubber-band, His love draws us back to Him.

His heart may break at our rebellion, our foolish pride, our dogged determination to hang on to fears and other things that haunt us and take our eyes off Him.

His heart may break; but his love never does.

As we grow in Him ... and become more and more like Him... spending time with Him... our hearts become less brittle, more stretchy - like His.

Our hearts are able to reach out to others.

We become more willing for Him to stretch us and we grow.

AA's devotion had gone on to show how the Devil and his angels (and "his son - if he has one") was not like that. They were like the pieces of note paper which AA tore with ease.

We were well into our prayer before the timer went off.