Recently, my wife received a call from our son’s teacher. Now, this is always a mixed bag of emotions. Growing up, when my teacher called home in the middle of the school day it only meant one thing ... spankin’ time. However, our son has been well-behaved and hasn’t had some of the problems his daddy had, and this turned out to be no different.
Before I go into the material discussion of that call, it will help to lay the groundwork for where this conversation originated — the night before. That evening, our son had asked about the devil. At some point in church, he had been introduced to the idea that the devil is bad. We felt compelled to go into a little more detail and explained that the Lord is good and our family desires to be close to the Lord and the devil is bad and we want to stay away from the devil.
“Like teams?” he asked.
“Well, yes, I guess it is like teams. We want to be on the Lord’s team and not on the devil’s team,” I responded.
“Who is on the devil’s team?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t know, but we want to share the message with people that they should be on the good team, the Lord’s team.”
He seemed to digest that and we moved onto other topics. Now fast-forward to the next morning on the car ride to school.
“Daddy, I forgot my paper!”
“What paper?” I asked.
“The paper where I was going to list who was on what team!” he said disappointedly. I laughed and explained that it probably isn’t appropriate to list out who is on what team. That’s the Lord’s job. It’s our job to try and get people to join the good team, the Lord’s team.
This leads us up to the now-legendary phone call. Our teacher on the other end of the line shared an event that occurred that day at school. Apparently, our son excitedly raised his hand in class and said he had something to share.
Once given the opportunity to speak, he polled the class, “How many of you are on the Lord’s team?” Most in the class raised their hand.
“And how many of you are on the devil’s team?” A couple of remaining students (probably unclear on what exactly he was asking them) raised their hands.
This is when our 5-year-old son broke into his sermon, explaining why everyone should be on the Lord’s team because He is good, and not on the devil’s team because he is clearly bad.
Just like any good pastor, he closed his sermon with an alter call, “Now, how many of you are on the Lord’s team?” Everyone raised their hands. Mission accomplished.
We are so thankful we have a teacher for our son that would take time out of her busy day to call and share this story with us, a story that reminds us of what is truly important during this season of thanks.
Now, if we can only get him to pass the plate and collect an offering, we’ll be in business!
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(Editor’s Note: Matt has a family of five — a beautiful wife, a son, a daughter and of course, Tucker the dog. Matt is also thankful for turkey, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, pumpkin pie with whipped creme on top and football on Thanksgiving Day. The columnist adds, “As you can tell by my waistline.” Matt’s column appears every Wednesday in the Cleveland Daily Banner.)
