Last week I shared with you an incident that occurred while I was taking care of three of my grandsons for 2 ½ weeks. Today I am going to bore you with one more “happening”.
The youngest grandson, age four, is like so many other children his age. He can be loud…he’s tough…he “bulls” his way through life…and yet he has a softer side. He proved this during those weeks by showing me that he is rather obsessed with dandelions. If he sees one…you can bet he will run to it…pick it…and then, of course, present it to whichever adult he is with. I know this because while I lived with them…I seemed to always have a “bouquet” of them on the kitchen counter. Each time he was so proud of his findings and even more proud to bless me with one, or two, or three. He would grin from ear to ear and when I would say that I needed to get them in water right away…his face would just glow.
Simplicity. When I look up this word, it says that it is “the state or quality of being simple. Something easy to understand or explain seems simple, in contrast to something complicated.” My grandson giving me the dandelions was a very simple act of love. It didn’t cost him anything, but I could have cared less…just the simple gift from him warmed my heart each and every time. I didn’t care that it wasn’t a huge bouquet of roses that would last for days because I knew, from the look on his face, that his desire was to do something special…and that was enough for me.
Why do we make life so complicated? Why do we feel the need to always have more…to always have the best of everything…to always be one rung higher on the ladder of success than the person working next to us? And we wonder why we are under so much stress and so unhappy. We’ve become a society where the word simplicity isn’t even used much, because for some reason if it is simple…we think there must be something wrong with it.
We’ve even made Christianity complicated. We often say we can’t tell others about our Jesus because we just don’t know what to say. We are scared to death they will ask us questions which we won’t know the answers to, and we work ourselves up into a lather just thinking about it. As a result…we keep quiet and just hope there is a pastor nearby who will share with those whom God puts in our path.
Or, we don’t share with others because, like I said, we are just too busy running here and there…trying to get more and more…and taking time to talk to others is not on our “to-do” list. It’s just too big of an inconvenience. We just don’t have time.
What a tragedy. There are people who are searching for the hope we have in Jesus…but unless we begin to simply tell them about Him…they may never know. We don’t need big, hard-to-pronounce theological words…we just need to let them see Jesus through us. In fact, many times we don’t need to use words at all. We just need to genuinely care about them…love them…and let them see us being the hands and feet of Jesus.
I have an idea. As we go throughout our day today…let’s keep our eyes open for dandelions. They just happen to be everywhere right now and let’s use them as a reminder to intentionally take notice of those whom God puts in our path. I’m guessing if we do that…there will be those who will grin from ear to ear as they begin to see Jesus through our simple acts of love.
“Return home and tell how much
God has done for you.”
So the man went away and told all over town
how much Jesus had done for him.
Luke 8:39
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