Last night the hs ministry went skating… I don’t remember the last time I wore roller skates, but I do remember my skating rink experiences as a child at after school care… and every time I think about them, I think about one story in particular…
My mom ran the after school program I went to in elementary school. When I was in 5th grade, we went to the skating rink one afternoon a week. I loved going to the skating rink… it was fun hanging out with my friends, I could play my favorite video game at the time (a car racing one), I could get a big pickle to eat, not to mention the skating part… my favorite song that they played at the skating rink was “bust a move”…
There was this boy named alan who was always at the skating rink when we went… he was the cool kid at the skating rink with his cool skates… he worked at the skating rink or was friends with the people or had connections, because he could get up in the dj booth and pick the music… he was only my age or a year older than me and all of my friends thought he was really cute and talked about him incessantly…
That annoyed me… maybe it was because I wanted my friends’ attention or maybe it was because secretly, I wanted to like him but didn’t want to be like all my friends… I’ve never been a bandwagon kind of girl… I would talk about how much I hated him and how he wasn’t cute at all… and how annoying he was… I don’t think I believed any of those things in my heart, but that’s definitely what I said…
I went over to my mom who was standing with the lady who ran the other daycare who shared our day and started going on and on about that alan boy and how annoying it was that everyone thought he was cute… then I found out the truth… that lady who owned the other daycare was definitely his mom…
I was pretty embarrassed about it, but I didn’t really care because he was annoying and I was annoyed that all my friends only wanted to talk about him and not do fun stuff like eat pickles and play video games with me… I didn’t really hate him or anything, I just didn’t care that much about him… and I didn’t want to fight for his attention… I just wanted to skate and eat pickles and play video games…
One of the days I was playing my video game and he walked over and asked me if I wanted to go out or be his girlfriend or something to that effect… and I was elated… that might have been the only conversation we ever had, but I was so happy that he had chosen me… the next few weeks would definitely be filled with my mind wandering during Ms. Warren’s class while I made a cross with our initials written in the squares on my heart-designed lisa frank paper… the boy that every girl wanted had chosen me… suddenly it didn’t matter than I thought he was annoying and hated him… he chose me because he wanted to… and technically, since we never talked after that one time, i guess, we are actually still dating…
While I was at passion last week, I was challenged in many ways about my relationship with Christ. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the joy of simply having a relationship with Jesus. Somewhere along the way I’ve stopped feeling about Jesus the way I did when I wrote a cross with my initials and alan’s initials in the box on my heart paper. This morning as I was thinking about everything, my head went to Titus (of all places) and a passage of scripture that I heard many times in college…Titus 3:3-7
“For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hop of eternal life.”
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