Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Stuck

It recently came to my attention that I misnamed my youngest child. We painstakingly chose John Bryant because it fit our exacting specifications. John is a family name (my grandfather's) and Bryant caught Steve's fancy because it is Irish, or so he claims. It turns out we should have gone with Billy Graham or Chuck Swindoll or even Martin Luther.

The Sunday before school started I was frazzled from wrestling with the technology in my classroom and commandeered Steve to come work out the bugs in my Power Point crammed with riveting slides of the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement, war protests, political uprisings and natural disasters set to Switchfoot singing "we were meant to live for so much more". A quick trip to WalMart for batteries was required, so Steve took off and left me to tinker with my last minute to do list and wrangle the boys.
Brendan and Bryant begged to run laps around the upper floor of our building and in desperate need of quiet I agreed. Brendan took off and left his brother in the dust. Bryant spotted a stranger and decided to forgo the run after all. You should know that no matter how many times I say, "Don't talk to strangers", he still does. He's already one of those schmoozy guys who can and does talk to a lamp post. To him, if they smile at you they are no longer a stranger, they are your new best friend. Evening news, here we come...

So he corners this sweet new math teacher in the copy room. New math teacher (NMT) is making copies and punching holes in them when my pint sized used car salesman says, "Hi. My mom's been telling me about how you can ask Jesus into your heart. And then you can pray to him and he'll help you all the time."

NMT says, "Oh, that's nice."

Now we did have this conversation, about two weeks prior, but as I recall he changed the subject to puppy dogs or Power Rangers, so I assumed he wasn't interested or listening. Wrong!!! But he doesn't stop there. "Do you want to ask Jesus into your heart right now?" he says to NMT. With an awkwardness I can literally hear through the wall, she says, "I'll have to talk to your mommy about that."

At that point the little evangelist comes running back into my classroom, but turns right back around and disappears again. I can hardly contain my laughter when he says to NMT, "Um actually, when you get Jesus into your heart I don't think you can get him out again. He's just stuck there."

NMT has never brought up that conversation, but has resumed making eye contact with me. I know there are lots of believers in our building, but who knew the first to share Christ with her would be my baby Billy Graham?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

LOL that is so funny! Kids are so stinkin cute!