Crime Fighting Fiction

My daughter has always known the truth about Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, etc. She has always been matter-of-fact about them, even arguing vehemently with an adult about their existence. We have taught her about why these creatures came about in stories and how some were based on actual people. My husband and I had decided long before having children that we would let them in on the secret from the beginning in an effort to not squash their little hearts when they discovered the lie and eventually start questioning the existence of real things. I knew this was the right decision when last year I heard my daughter say “Santa is not real but God is.”

So imagine my surprise at my daughter’s sobs when she learned that a cartoon character was not real.

Last night, I was laying her down for the night. We started talking about a show that she had started watching and my husband and I used to watch all the time when we were kids.

“Kim Possible” was a favorite cartoon of mine, cheerleader by day and world crime fighter at night. She kicked some major rear end and even as an adult she is fun to watch. But much to my daughter’s dismay, she is a cartoon.

Between her sobs, my daughter confessed that she had been wanting to meet her.

My heart broke at her sobs. She then started asking about other shows.

“What about Peanuts?”

“No, honey. Peanuts started as a cartoon in a newspaper, then as a cartoon on TV, and then a movie as an animation.”

More sobs.

My heart broke for her.

It was actually quite disturbing.

I had a hard time wrapping my mind around this news that my six-year-old could not distinguish a cartoon character from a real person.

I wrapped her in my arms and told her how those things aren’t real, but Mommy and Daddy are real. That Kim Possible is not real, but there are real women, police officers, fighting crime everyday. And God is real, which is even more cool. The same God that parted the sea for the Israelites also created her. He knows her and loves her, which is so much better than a cartoon.

This experience has made me realize the detriment of allowing my child to watch an enormous amount of TV. Hey, it’s summer! Why not?

I thought that a six-year-old would be able to handle lots of TV during the summer. Only a toddler would confuse TV and real life, right?

Well, we were wrong.

Then I started thinking about when I was in high school and was saddened when “Fresh Prince” was filming it’s last season.

Saddened. I literally cried during the last episode.

It was as if these characters were real. The actors were real, yes, but the storyline and characters were not. Even as a teenager, I had a tough time seeing the difference.

If I struggled with reality as a teenager, my daughter’s struggle makes sense.

Which means it’s time to cut back on TV and spend more face-to-face time so that she can start to see the difference. Real-life relationships are more meaningful than a shape drawn on paper.

I’m glad that we spend time getting ready for bed, without electronics to distract us from building our family relationship. Otherwise, I may not have known about our daughter’s disillusion.

So TV is going to be shut off for the majority of the day so that we can help her build up real, meaningful relationships and not form relationships with fictional characters.

Although being friends with a chick who fights crime would be pretty rockin’.

 

Songs of Heaven

I can hear again! After three weeks of muffled, underwater conversations and requests to repeat a sentence, I can finally hear something besides my own breathing and a weird whirring inside my ear drums.

The cause of my temporary hearing loss? Embarrassingly, compacting the ear wax with a towel (yeah, don’t do that), a possible infection either sinus or inside the ear and possibly environmental allergies.

And it.was.AWFUL!

We don’t know how much we use our hearing until we lose it. I lost sleep because I couldn’t tell if someone was coming up the stairs or my husband was snoring. I couldn’t have a conversation with someone unless I could see their lips. I was uncomfortable taking my daughter anywhere because I couldn’t make out her voice in a sea of people and was afraid of losing sight of her.

But the hardest part was being in church and not hearing the congregation sing. I could hear those on stage with their microphones, which was fine, but I couldn’t hear other voices. I didn’t sing because in my head, my voice overpowered everyone else.

I started wondering why this bothered me so much. Then one of my running friends recently mentioned an idea… in Heaven we are all singing as one to God, worshipping Him. And if I only hear myself and two other people, it’s not “like Heaven.”

I pondered this the rest of the weekend. At church this morning, the first song started and I suddenly realized my friend was exactly right. I sang but my voice was swept away with the rest of the crowd and our voices rose up as one voice, lifted up in a glorious love song to our God. Oh how wonderful Heaven is, to be able to sing as one gigantic group of people, worshipping our Creator!

And if my hearing levels hadn’t dropped dramatically, I wouldn’t have begun to understand these glorious gifts from God: hearing and fellowshipping through song.

I am also beginning to understand the importance of not taking anything for granted, even something as simple as hearing.

God is the Master Teacher and uses these life lessons to help us to grow.

I am definitely going to work on not taking the little things for granted.

Oh and, for the love of Pete, never use a towel to clean your ears!

Honestly

“The last blog you wrote was kinda weak. It was really short. That’s not a blog.”

My husband spoke these words to me.

Now hold on before you get all judgemental on my critical husband.

He has always been honest with me. Courageously honest.

When I drag him to the store so I can find clothes, I count on his honesty to ensure I am making smart choices with our money.

“Does this dress make me look fat?”

The dreaded question that husbands and boyfriends dread.

His response “It looks like it’s uncomfortable.” Clever answer.

I can always count on his honesty, even if it might sting. Honesty can be an uncomfortable skill.

I had a friend in high school who had cats. She came to school smelling like, well, cats. I didn’t care that she had an odor. She was my bestie! But someone had told her she smelled. She asked me if she smelled. I felt trapped! I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I lied and told her no. To this day, I wish I had told her the truth. She deserved the truth from her best friend and telling her the truth, in a nice and respectful way, could have saved her aggravation from other kids who continued to alert her to her scent. Maybe our friendship wouldn’t have unraveled and she wouldn’t have lost trust in me.

Honesty is a tough obstacle in our relationships. How can you be honest without hurting others?

I have discovered that my husband has a knack for helpful honesty. He is able to tell the truth without hurting.

God wants us to be honest with each other. Not just because lying is a sin but because He knows we have a difficult time trusting each other if we’re not honest. If I am not honest with a friend, how is this friend going to listen to me when I tell them about Salvation?

Because my husband is honest with me, I actually believe him when he says I’m beautiful (even when I swear I’m fat).

So when we were at the mall watching our daughter and niece play in the children’s area and he out-of-the-blue commented on my last blog, I knew it really was not my best work. It didn’t hurt my feelings; it made me want to write a better one. His comment also proved to me that he cares about my writing and he’s actually spending the time reading it!

And having a husband or boyfriend or bestie who is respectfully honest with you can strengthen your relationship.

Now if I can just get my daughter to be honest about why the dog is wearing my daughter’s headband. I honestly doubt “he just wanted to look pretty.”

 

 

 

Nutso

The humidity rolls in like a blanket, suffocating us. The temp is 78° but it feels like the inside of an oven. Runners and their dogs are either nuts or hardcore. I’d like to think we are the latter.

Always Be Prepared

Does your child know what to do in case of an emergency?

Play the “What if” game and find out.

“What if the smoke alarms go off? What would you do?”

“What if you see a car accident in front of our house?”

“What if your little brother gets bitten by a stray cat while playing outside?”

“What if Mommy started choking and no other adult is at home?”

My daughter and I played this game today, using the latter scenario, and it was a HUGE eye opener!

She knew to call 911 (most kids her age know that). But we don’t have a landline and she has never actually had to type in phone numbers before on my phone. Most families are in the same situation and aren’t prepared for this. Do you teach your child how to get to the numbers so they can type 911 or do you already have it saved as an emergency phone number?

We also talked about what to say. If I were choking I would have no way of telling her what to say. I showed her the universal sign of choking (my hands on my neck) and taught her to say “Mommy’s  choking and can’t breathe.”

We have a large, very protective dog. She would need to move him to a room behind a closed door so that he wouldn’t attack the responders.

These are all things that I had no idea she didn’t know.

But now she does.

It’s morbid, I know, to feel you have to teach these things to your six-year -old. She was scared at first when we started talking about the scenario. But the more we knew the plan the less scared she was.

Hopefully we don’t have to put this plan into real action some day but if necessary, she’ll be ready.

Play this game with your kiddos (no matter the age). If they can speak and use a phone they could save your life or someone else’s life. Come up with a real life scenario. Then throw in something way out there to make it fun.

What are some scenarios and plans of actions you came up with? Did you have a family plan that had to be put to use in real life?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Idle Hands

Today was a lazy day.

After being on the road for a full week, working in my classroom and plowing through yet another Laundry Mountain, I just wanted to watch TV and read. My exhausted daughter didn’t argue.

But that also meant no working out, cleaning or encouraging my child to stick to a routine.

Around 5pm, that nasty five-letter word started kicking in, right on schedule.

Guilt.

Why can’t I miss a day of running or biking or swimming without that yucky feeling? Why can’t I skip a day of cleaning? What’s wrong with stepping away from routine for one day?

Is a rest day besides the Sabbath wrong?

I’m not a smarty pants with the Bible but I feel that God has encoded our corrupted genes with that guilty buzzer for a reason. Guilt crops up when we feel we might be doing something wrong. It forces us to pause for a moment and think about our decisions. Many of us ignore the negative feeling and push on. Some listen to that little voice and rethink their scenario.

Guilt is there for a good reason.

So is it wrong to take an extra day of relaxation? Yes and no.

God wants us to rest. He commands us to rest. He wants us to be refreshed in order to do our best when we return to the daily grind. He doesn’t want us to reach burnout.

But resting is different from being lazy.

If this is day number thirty in front of the TV, it might be time to turn off the tube.

So is it ok to just watch TV or read all day?

That’s a question I am struggling with right now.

When the guilt crawled into the back of my eyeballs, I stepped away from the couch and cleaned the porch.

There that oughta keep the guilt at bay.

Maybe the reason for the rest day is what makes the difference.

If you’re sick, worked long hours at the office, been up all night with a baby, I think these are good reasons for relaxing an extra day.

If it’s because your favorite show has an all-day  marathon after coming back from a relaxing week at the beach, that might be stretching it…unless you’re folding a basket of laundry at the same time.

As for me, I’m going to read another chapter. And then fold a towel. Just in case.

 

Empathetic Ear

After swimming many times on our road trip, I noticed my ears were feeling uncomfortable. On the last leg of our trip my right ear completely plugged up and I realized I could hear very little out of that side of my noggin. I tried the methods I had available to me but until we returned home where I could get a hold of medicine or asking for help from the family doctor I was just going to have to live with the discomfort.

Having this temporary problem helped me to understand a few things.

If I slept on my good side, I couldn’t hear a thing. I discovered this put me on edge. I couldn’t hear if my daughter was having a nightmare in the hotel bed next to us which meant I wouldn’t be able to comfort her. I also wouldn’t be able to hear any other signs that could mean danger (a picking at the lock, tornado sirens going off, fire alarms, etc.). Although now that I am wide awake I understand I would probably be able to hear an obnoxiously loud alarm and really who would break into our hotel room? But I learned that my natural instincts are to have some sort of mama bear protection over my family and I must rely on my hearing to be able to create this safety bubble. Very strange. So I slept on my right side the entire time.

I also discovered that having only one working ear makes it extremely difficult to discern what is being said to me and that someone is even talking to me. I was sitting across the table from my husband and while his voice only needed to travel three feet to reach my ear I had no idea he was talking to me unless I was looking at him. If I was looking down at my food, his voice was mixed in with the rest of the voices at the restaurant. He had asked me a question and I thought I was hearing the man behind me talking to his wife. I had to really work to have a simple conversation with my family.

Then I started thinking about my daughter. She was diagnosed with ADHD last year. She is not severe but without going into too much of her life, she has difficulty having a conversation with someone because something else catches her attention. Many times, I have had to touch her hand to help her understand that I am talking to her. We have learned to make sure we have eye contact before giving her an instruction. Although my issue was a temporary physical discomfort, she struggles greatly with the difference of wiring in her brain. In that short time at breakfast, my eyes were beginning to open with what she has to deal with on a daily basis.

And now I feel guilty for getting short-tempered or impatient with her. She must feel so frustrated.

Did God plug my ear to give a very small window into the life of a child with ADHD? I have had students with this diagnosis. I have been trained on supporting different struggles in the classroom. We continuously find ways to help students survive then thrive in the classroom.

But helping a student to succeed is very different from trying to understand what that child is going through.

Thank you, God, for pushing me through the bubble of ignorance and encouraging me to move toward empathy.

I understand that a simple clogged ear no where compares to actually living with a real diagnosis. But it did open my eyes to understand that I really don’t know as much as I  thought.

Sunday of Possibilities

Yesterday, I started my Sunday with a run on a treadmill. We were in a hotel and I wanted to get a quick workout in before our day took off. Before I jumped on the dreadmill, I flipped the TV on and switched channels until I found a sermon.

As I was running, I enjoyed the fact that I could ‘attend’ church even when not able to physically be in church. Then I started thinking about what would happen if someone walked in to workout as well.

A sermon is not something one would expect to see on TV when walking into a fitness room. I have usually walked in on a Friend’s episode, news, or a soap opera.

How would a sermon be taken?

Would a person walk in then promptly exit? Would someone just switch channels? Or would someone just start working out and attempt to ignore it but then eventually start listening? Maybe someone would walk in and excitedly mention that they are also believers and how nice it is to work out next to a stranger who is also a believer?

Then I started asking myself how I would feel? Honestly.

Would I feel embarrassed? Many times, that is the emotion that I instantly fall to then I start asking God for forgiveness for that immediate shortcoming.

Would there be tension as I wait for a response? Would this be a pathway for sharing the Gospel? Would I stay silent if the channel was changed? I wouldn’t want to force that on someone if they weren’t open to receiving it.

How bold would I be?

Then the thirty minutes was up, the treadmill stopped, and I wiped the river of sweat from the handles and buttons.

I waited for a moment before I turned the TV off. As I closed the door behind me, I wondered what would happen if someone walked in and turned the TV on to see a sermon.

 

 

 

Weeds

Everytime I get home, all I see are the weeds in the garden. Today, coffee in hand, I started yanking those weeds out, one-by-one, focused and determined. As I pulled out a weed, my eyes would spy another weed. Then I would notice another weed I didn’t see a minute ago. That was my morning today after returning home from the dog park. I saw those nasty, green vile leaves, and set to work. It really didn’t take long and the garden and the side of the house look healthier, the red mulch looks visible now, and my flowers look less terrified.

Weeds are a lot like sin, aren’t they? They can be hidden for a long time until they poke through the ground and consume everything in their path. And when they are being pulled (or brought out to light, confessed and forgiven) another weed is suddenly spied and it needs to get yanked out, too. Sins can be seen by strangers or have been around for so long you just get used to them and don’t even notice them anymore.

Just like removing weeds, removing sin is a constant, never-ending war. When you have accepted Jesus into your heart, you start to really see the weeds in your life and start pulling them out. Then you see another one and pull that one out, too. If you’re not careful, you start to see weeds in other people’s yards and, instead of showing God’s love, you may start to point out their weeds. Or you may even try to pull them out yourself, never a good idea and a fast road toward the end of that friendship and possibly pushing them away from God.

God wants us to see the weeds in our yards and, yes, He wants us to pull them out. But He also wants us to pull up a chair with a cup of coffee and enjoy the flowers. He wants us to marvel at the beauty that He is growing in our gardens. It can become more of a warfare against sin and less of reveling in God, that we lose sight of what He wants to do with us. And if we spend all of our time yanking out weeds, we can get so frustrated that we may walk away from the garden and give up.

So while I spend a moment sifting through the mistakes I have made and offer them up to God, I also need to spend time just being with Him and breathing in His flowery presence.

After all, He is the Master Gardener.

Childlike Behavior

Joy like a child.

Right now, my daughter and I are at the pool, enjoying the beginning days of summer break. She is playing in the sprayarea and I am relaxing in a chair.

“Mommy! Watch!” she screams as she flies down the little slide. She will go down this slide over and over again until I have to bribe her with ice cream so that we can go home. She plays for hours (as long as it’s something she’s interested in) laughing, screaming, singing, talking to imaginary characters in her own little world.

When do we lose that? That carefree, joyous, play in the mud, make believe play time? What would happen if everyday at work, for one hour everyone had to stop working and just…play? No electronics. Just Legos and Barbie, cardboard boxes, little watercolor sets, squirt guns and water balloons. Better yet, everyday an hour of required playground time. Could you picture business suits going down slides and women going across the monkey bars?

Let’s try this challenge: for one month each day, for just five minutes, you have to play like a child. Run around your house and play tag. Show up at a playground and ignore the bewildered looks of children as you speed to the swings and fly like Superman. Dump out your old box of Legos (don’t lie…you know you kept them) and just build something.

Seriously. Let’s do this.

Gotta go. My six-year-old wants me to be the shark in the water. Game on.