This afternoon, as I went to tend to a task upstairs, I asked one of my children to gather the ingredients for Baked Oatmeal, and when I came down stairs later, I would put them together and bake it. A couple minutes later, all was too quiet. When I looked into the kitchen, there gathered not only all the ingredients, but also my 3 darling children. They were being so helpful……. they had decided to make the Baked Oatmeal to surprise me. Unfortunately, the recipe didn’t get followed exactly – tsp got mixed up with Tbsp, “sugar OR honey” got translated into “sugar AND honey”. Oh well, too late now…… we’re crunched for time, so we’ll quickly bake it.
Needless to say, I didn’t handle the situation very well (did you read my previous post on “evil thoughts and actions”?)! Just when you think you have something conquered…. Satan throws you a curve ball! Some wonderful advice from my Mother (after complaining about the expensive, wasted ingredients), “People are more important than things“. Yikes!
Later Landon came to me, and read to me from his “Keys for Kids”. It was about the Collie dog being man’s best friend. It was describing the many attributes of a Collie dog, one of them being that they are highly sensitive. “If they have done anything wrong, it isn’t necessary to do a lot of scolding; they just need to be shown gently what they were supposed to do, and they will understand”.
Don’t misunderstand me, there is a time and a place for punishment. But I’m also a firm believer that the punishment should fit the crime. Hmmmm, maybe, just maybe, I over reacted to the messed-up oatmeal? So instead of punishment, the kids got a gentle reminder of what can happen when we run ahead and don’t wait for instruction. Not a new concept, after all the Bible is full of examples of people who didn’t wait for God (Abraham, Jacob, David, Moses,……), but the blessing comes when we wait for instructions, and follow them.
That was a special story…Keep writing!!