Velcro
My five-year-old was tying her shoes today. Okay, she was velcroing her shoes. Is “velcroing” a word? Spellcheck seems to disagree but then it also just disagreed with the word, “spellcheck”. So back to the story…
My five-year-old was velcroing her shoes today. I’ll be honest. It took forever. She actually started at 4pm yesterday. Okay, that’s not true, but waiting on someone to tie their shoes gets old at about the 7 second mark. Job, I am not. That’s Job with a long “o”, not the way you make a living. Anyway, she was working on her shoes and I had this overwhelming urge to grab her feet and finish the job. (This time it is with a short “o”.) But the point is I wanted to grab her shoes and help her. Or at least hurry it along. But I didn’t. Because I wanted her to know that she could fix hernown shoes. And I wanted her to keep getting better at it. Guess how much better she gets at it when I do it for her? None. But today I took an extra 60 seconds and waited for her, and she took one more step towards being an independent capable possibly professional Velcro-er.
And I started thinking about how God looks at His kids. Namely, me. Life, obedience, holiness, all must look so simple to Him, and yet I sit here struggling with every moment of it. I make it much harder than it has to be sometimes. And I fail often. And I cry out to God, “How can you stand by and let all this happen? Are you even there? Do you really care?” (I deeply apologize for that rhyme. It was unintentional. I promise never to
use cheap rhyme schemes like that in my music.) But the truth is God is not absent. He is not passive. He is a loving parent, knowing that I must take these steps to become the man He wants me to be. He aches with my frustration. He longs for my joy and success but not at the cost of my growth. He can’t just rescue me each time. I have to walk the steps. And maybe then, someday, giving cheerfully, loving the unlovely, evangelism, holiness, all will be as easy as Velcro. But not today.