Dear Elderly Christian, I know you don’t like being called elderly, so let’s start with me begging your pardon for not coming up with a better word to describe your current phase of life (it’s better than “old,” right?). Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I need to ask you a favor: please get off the sidelines and get back into the game.
Tonight, I was on my way upstairs to go to bed when I noticed a little army of ponies, dollhouse family members, and plastic toy accessories lined along the bottom step. One of my little girls had placed them there very deliberately, so I decided to leave them, rather than clean them up.
Dear girls, The two of you have reached the ages of four and three, which is about the age your Uncle Caleb and I were the night of the Brown’s Chapel Baptist Church Christmas program. Stick with me, girls, this is going somewhere.
Four and a half years ago, someone gave my newborn daughter a paperback book called Let it Snow. I’ve probably read it several hundred times since then, in part because we had another child who loved the book as much as my oldest daughter.
My youngest daughter, who is three, is affectionate, smart, and perceptive – but at the same time, she’s a major handful sometimes. She’s getting better, but over the course of her three years of life, she has been known to do things like . . .
The other night at bedtime, I was about to pray for my youngest daughter, but I stopped myself.
One time when I was six years old, my dad shut the car door on my hand. He didn’t see what he had done until the teeth of the clasp had already closed on my fingers and it was too late. But for some reason, I just froze up and didn’t cry at all.
I have some dear Christian friends whose eight-year-old son profoundly struggles with doubting God. Although my heart aches for them as they parent him through unbelief, I’m not worried about him.
When I was a little boy, my mother would regularly tell my brother Caleb and me to go outside and play. We were happy to oblige for a half hour or so, but then we would get hot and bored and decide to go back inside. However, when we came back to the house, we would often discover she had locked us out.
The other day, I was riding the city bus with my daughters in Washington, D.C., when I noticed a heavy-set, middle-aged couple sitting next to us wearing shirts that appeared to read “MILLION MAN MARCH FOR BIBLES” in hot pink. But I wasn’t totally sure that’s what it said, because they were leaning forward looking at their phones, and it made it hard to read their shirts.
Dear Mom, The other day, someone came into my office and asked me why I have an old typewriter in there. I said, “My mom gave me that for my birthday back when I was in the sixth grade. She said I was a writer, so she wanted me to have a typewriter to help me do it right. I always appreciated it because it showed me how much she believed in me.”
I am not known for raising my voice in frustration – at least not by my coworkers and friends. Apparently, it’s a different story with my family.
Yesterday, my two-year-old daughter and I walked to our neighborhood Walmart, which is a block and a half from our home in Washington, D.C. While we were in the meat department, Renee noticed an elderly lady in an automated wheelchair, but the woman didn’t see us because we were behind her.
We’re in the middle of packing our things to move to Washington, DC, and as you can imagine, doing that with a two and four-year-old is pretty challenging. But yesterday, a lady whom I only know as “Miss Anne” made life a whole lot easier for us and the kids.
This week, my dad is visiting my brother and me, and I was a little concerned that it would take a while for my daughters to get comfortable with him – I mean, they very rarely get to see him, so he’s not familiar to them. However, the minute my dad walked into the room, my most bashful daughter went straight to him, and they started playing together.
Joshua Rogers 