Christina and her kids came over for a few
hours yesterday. They had to be out of
their house for a while because it was being shown by real estate agents. Once that property is finally sold, they will
actually have to find a house of their own, so they have been looking in the
League City and Dickinson area up near their church.
While they were here Noa made a
discovery. She and Josiah were playing
with Nathan’s old stash of G.I. Joes and all the paraphernalia that goes along
with it. Nathan was always – how shall I
say this? – “creative” in his play with those particular action figures. They often had run-ins with Barbie dolls (belonging to our niece, Sarah), for
example, that never ended well for the Barbie dolls. Those crises usually happened in the hot tub. It was when they battled each other, though,
that things really got gruesome. Those
poor figures underwent all manner of torture, from hanging by the neck (a
favorite when we were in the car on long road trips. On one trip into Canada we forgot to bring a birth
certificate for Nathan to prove he was really our child. When the border looked into the back of the
car and saw Nathan’s elaborate system of string laced across the seat with G.I.
Joe figures hanging from numerous appendages, she waved us right on
through. It was as if they wanted no
part of him in their child welfare system) to having limbs ripped from their
bodies. I’m fairly certain, though, that
none of them ever gave up any information to the enemy.
Well, as it happened, Noa found one of the
survivors of that period of Nathan history, a figure with no legs, and it
greatly disturbed her. She examined the
little fellow carefully, and then embarked on a crusade to make known to the
world this horrible atrocity of war. She
carried the figure up to each of us in turn, held it up to our faces, and
declared, “Man have owie.” Reminded me
of the Christmas when her Daddy got one of those Stretch Armstrong dolls. He wasn’t really sure what to do with it, so
me and his uncles decided to show him.
We each grabbed an arm or leg and stretched him to the limits of his
stretchableness. Kel was horrified at
the sight. He screamed and ran and
refused to even touch the doll for weeks after that. He finally got up the courage to take it in
hand once again, though. Only to try an
experiment some weeks later. He stabbed
it with a ball point pen. As the shiv
exited the body, with it came an oozing of some kind of fluid. Once again, he was horrified. This time he was able to put into words his
deepest fears of the moment, “I killed him.
I killed him,” came the cry. We put
a band aid over the spot to “stop the bleeding,” but to no avail. He once again refused to touch this unearthly
creature, this time insisting that he had killed it, so he didn’t want to touch
the dead body. We finally told him we
would take the figure to the hospital (read here, top shelf of Mom and Dad’s
private closet), and that calmed him down.
So, back to Noa. Though she didn’t get any response from her
older brothers, I certainly respected her sense of compassion and subsequent
commitment to a cause that repeatedly proved fruitless. Keep it up, young Noa. Someday your efforts are sure to be
appreciated by the rest of the world, especially when your brothers realize
just how much they could have made by selling that figure on ebay … if it had
both legs intact.
Colossians 3:12 says, “Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe
yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”
Father, thank you for the sense of
compassion Noa showed at so young an age, even for an action figure. May that mature within her as she grows into
a young woman. Amen.
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