A short while later, as I nestled into my bed, I found I did so amidst a small parking lot of Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars and trucks. It seems the latter had been transported there during naptime earlier in the day.
In addition to taking over all my personal space, they have also laid claim to any and all forms of entertainment. My television set, once accustomed to being used to watch the history channel, the science channel, the travel channel, the sports channel, or the classic movie channel, is now devoted almost exclusively to “Simple Songs”, “Blippi” episodes, or any and all things “Mario”, “Spiderman”, or “Hulk”.
My iPad, once used by me for my own favorite apps, is now almost exclusively utilized by my grandsons for their favorites, including dozens of Bimi Boo alphabet and math learning apps, Corona Labs construction apps, and Vroom emergency vehicle apps. (Thank goodness they cannot yet operate a laptop, or I would most likely not now be typing this very blog post!)
As if the overtake of my personal space and my personal entertainment venues were not bad enough, now, even my avenues of nourishment are under assault. Nothing, I repeat, nothing that has hitherto been reserved for me is off limits. I buy a bag of Cheetos and bring it home, only to discover that the majority of it gets consumed before I ever even have a chance to indulge.
The same goes for Slim Jim beef sticks, butter flavored popcorn, dill pickle flavored potato chips, Fritos, Doritos, yogurt, bacon, cheddar cheese, barbecue flavored pig skins, and a whole assortment of other essential components of a flavorful and nutritionally balanced diet.
And don’t even get me started on soft drinks or flavored water. These get scarfed down faster than a spoonful of water in the Sahara desert! Indeed, given that a human being can go weeks without food but only days without liquid intake, I could well go down due to dehydration long before I ever do due to starvation!
And yet, I would not change one single aspect of any of this. Why? Because I absolutely love my grandsons! What a blessing they all are!
You see, over the last few years, my wife and I have been inundated with factors typically associated with the “fourth quarter” of life. Shortly after retirement, I lost my mother, and then my older sister. Not long thereafter, my wife lost her father. Thus it is that our focus as of late has been primarily on things that are somewhat sad and depressing.
What a welcome distraction, therefore, have all of our seven grandsons, each under the age of seven, been for my wife and me!
As two who have now lived through 62 winters, my wife and I know all too well how welcome the advent of spring can be. Likewise, as a couple who have now reached the fall of our lives (and who are fast approaching winter), we fully recognize the value of an injection of springtime along the way!
Children can be just that. They are like a breath of fresh air. They bring much needed joy and laughter to life! Both the questions they ask and the statements they make can prove hilarious. I never tire of receiving texts from my daughter recounting conversations between herself and one or more of her three sons. Here is one such example she recently sent me of her four year old son’s bedtime prayer:
“God is good. God is great. I thank you for Jesus dying on the cross for our sins and raising from the dead three days later. I thank you for dinosaurs are real and got stuck. I thank you for Megalodon. I thank you for Great White Sharks. I thank you for the biggest Megalodon and biggest Great White Shark. Amen.”
At times, however, they can also be painfully forthright. Witness when one of my grandsons recently opined that I had a “big belly”! (We’ll hear no more on this matter!)
It might be said that my grandsons make such statements because they have not yet learned the fine art of being civil. Or of being polite. But in reality, it is purely because they are unpretentious. That is to say that they have not yet learned the fine art of acting like, or pretending to be, something they are in order to appear that they are something that, in reality, they are not!
Praise God for what may be the most significant and commendable quality of childhood: unpretentiousness. Praise God for children, who are almost always straightforward and forthright in their observations and assertions. And why not? Having yet been conditioned, they generally have nothing to hide, nothing to obfuscate, and nothing to mediate!
How unlike we are as adults. For by contrast, we tend to hide things from others, to confuse or muddy the circumstances, and/or to seek ways to arbitrate any and everything that might otherwise make us uncomfortable.
Little wonder that Jesus once said (in the New Testament Gospel of Matthew, chapter 18, verse 3) that “unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven.” In other words, to come humbly before Him, in full recognition that we are separated from Him by our sinfulness, and are therefore in need of His redemptive work in order to be made whole again.
In this world, unpretentiousness matters in childhood. How much more does it matter, therefore, in terms of eternity?! All that God requires of us is that we be completely honest with Him about who we are and what our needs are in His presence. In other words, that we do not stand before him with pretense!
Just a little lesson from seven precious little ones. But, oh what a big little lesson!
SCRIPTURE SOURCE:
https://biblehub.com/matthew/18-3.htm.