This article is printed in the March Tidings.
In his book Fatherhood, Bill Cosby speaks of times when his children were young that he started to question his intelligence as a parent. “I began entertaining these doubts,” he writes, “when my first daughter was about 18 months old. Every time I went into her room, she would take some round plastic thing from her crib and throw it on the floor. Then I would pick it up, wipe it off, and hand it back to her so that she could throw it back on the floor.
“‘Don’t throw that on the floor, honey,’ I’d tell her. ‘Do you understand Daddy? Don’t throw that on the floor.’ Then I would give it back to her and she would throw it again. Picking it up once more, wiping it off, and returning it to her, I would say, ‘Look, I just told you not to throw this…’ And of course, she would listen carefully to me and then throw it again.
“This little game,” he suggests, “is a wonderful exercise for a father’s back, but it’s his mind that needs developing. Sometimes a father needs 10-15 such droppings before he begins to understand that he should leave the thing on the floor…During this little game, the child has been thinking: ‘This person is a lot of fun. He’s not too bright, but a lot of fun.’” (Cosby, Bill. Fatherhood. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1986, p. 38-9.)
When it comes to matters of faith, it takes all of us time to learn and model the important things, too. We declare that we trust God, but personal worries can still keep us from sleeping well. We affirm the significance of forgiveness as a guiding principle, but can still be controlled by deeds of the past. We know the most critical calling of our lives is to nurture our relationship with God and others, but our best energy can be taken over by work or hobbies or television. In all kinds of ways, we can focus on the wrong things even while knowing that what we need to do is turn to God heart and soul, seeking insight or wholeness, renewal or strength.
During this season of Lent, I encourage you to find one place in your spiritual life where you want to grow and take first steps toward that goal. It might be to model patience or start a new prayer routine, to strive for greater balance in your day or offer time in the church nursery. It might be to join a Bible study or spend the first minutes after worship talking with someone you don’t know, join one of our church committees or volunteer to prepare a meal for our youth.
Whatever your plan, the key to change is choosing to begin and as you set out in that effort, don’t be discouraged if, in the language of that Philadelphia father, you endure 10-15 “droppings” or more along the way. For perhaps those times of falling short will help you discover why it was that God wanted you to take that path in the first place.
John