Well,
Texas is still up there. I’m not talking
about the Rangers. I’m still a die-hard
Astros fan. And no, I didn’t misspell
the name of the Houston professional football team. I mean the actual Texas. That state off the coast of which our little
Island Paradise is located. It’s the
week before the Super Bowl shows up in Houston, so things are a little crazy
there. New Englanders and Georgians are
making their way into town and establishing tailgating positioning. I think that’s sort of like GPS positioning,
only much less reliable.
So
why did we take our life in our hands and make a trip into Texas
yesterday? Well, we didn’t actually go
as far as the swamplands of the big city.
We went to Lifeway Christian Store to start out. That’s a little more than halfway to Houston,
but it’s still closer than I like to be found.
We needed communion supplies for church, and I needed to replenish my
stock of birthday cards, and they have them at the most reasonable prices (buy one box, get the next box free). We also scored Frank Peretti’s new book at
40% off. That was a coupon they sent us
in the mail. Not a bad haul, and since
we were there right after they opened, there really wasn’t that much traffic.
We did
a Sam’s run for the church as well. Our
last dinner on the grounds, when we hosted the group that had been staying in the
retreat center, pretty much depleted our stores of paper goods in the kitchen. That stop was on our way back to the
Island. In fact Sam’s is right down the
street from where Kel and Christina live, so we stopped in at Sonic for a
gourmet lunch and picked up a tray full of cherry slushes and went by to say
hi.
They
had a few little girls over for a play date, so we got them each a slush, too. That made us the good-guy grandparents. But it was at their house that we experienced
what was by far the most … interesting … part of our day. I went upstairs to say goodbye to the
thundering hordes. There was obviously
much hilarity going on when I arrived at the door to Micah and Josiah’s
bedroom. I knocked on the door and
waited for an answer. Suddenly, the door
flung wide before me, to reveal quite the spectacle. Oh, I’m not bothered by a floor full of
toys. That’s as it should be, I suppose. But what caught my eye was further up. All the way up, in fact. And it brought back memories of a much
earlier time, a time when a certain Uncle Nathan was young and carefree. The ceiling fan was spinning merrily, doing
its job. But the blades had extra
adornments. One of the boys (Not saying which one, but Micah was holding
the painter’s tape) had taped a Barbie doll to each blade. Upside down.
Hung by their feet. And every
other time the fan made a revolution, one doll in particular smacked her face
up against the bedstead. And since we
all know that Barbies can’t bend their arms, it was the perfectly devised
torture method. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t
be long before she gave up whatever information the evil Dr. Micah and his loyal
assistants desired. Honestly, it was
hilarious. Er, I mean horrible. Yes, that’s the word I meant to use …
Colossians
3:8-10 says, “But now you must rid
yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and
filthy language from your lips. Do not
lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices
and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image
of its Creator.”
Father,
thank you for playdates and for the creative ways boys find to make playing
dolls “OK”. Amen.
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