My Son Amazes Me Sometimes

During the summer, our church gives the regular children's teachers time off. After nine months with our kiddos, they certainly deserve more than a few Sundays of not teaching! Of course, in order to give them the time off, substitutes are needed. That's how, this summer, I've found myself teaching second and third graders a couple of times a month. Today was one of the days I got to teach.

Our church has been reading through the Bible this year. Therefore, it isn't always the old Sunday School stories that I find myself teaching. In fact, if I hadn't been doing Ownit365, I'm not sure I would have even know what exactly the story was talking about. The lesson was from the Old Testament. More specifically, it was from 2 Chronicles, Chapters 18 and 19. Those chapters contain the story of two kings. One follows God and the other doesn't. They consult 401 prophets, but only 1 is willing to speak the truth. In the end, the evil king loses his life by going into the battle. He was warned he would lose his life in the battle and took measures to keep that from happening. Of course, in the end, God's will prevailed.

The focus of the lesson was to choose your friends wisely. Certainly, it would have been easy to listen to the 400 false prophets rather than the 1 truthful one. Then again, Jehosophat never would have found himself in the predicament if he hadn't been friends with Ahab. I ramble.

One great thing about teaching on Sunday mornings has been that I get to see two of my own children during Kids' Worship. I love seeing them sing for Jesus. I also love knowing exactly what they've learned that morning.

Well today, even though I wasn't his teacher, I had to pull my son onto my lap because he was being so chatty with his two buddies. I didn't hold him for long, so I wasn't sure how much of the message he actually heard. That's why I was a bit surprised when I picked him up at the end of the service.

"Mom," he began with a concerned look on his face, "I don't know if ____ is a good friend."

I didn't even answer him since I was so shocked that he'd retained the message and was even applying it to his own life.

In fact, as I put him to bed later that night, he brought up the question of friends again. I wondered if maybe ____ was just the first friend that came to mind. So, I asked him about his other friends and whether or not they were good friends. He not only told me that they were, he also gave me examples of why they were good friends. He definitely hadn't randomly wondered about _____.

We discussed his friend in question for a few minutes. On his own, he came up with ways to avoid _____'s poor choices becoming his own. I was blown away. He truly got it!

I suppose I should mention that my son is only 5. He'll start Kindergarten this fall. I'm glad that thanks to our church reading the Bible and studying some of the lesser known stories, my son is more ready to begin a new phase of his life where neither I nor his dad can always choose his friends. That makes this mama very, very grateful.

Thanks, God for helping even the little ones understand your big truths.