Talking

Words have been on my mind a lot this week. Pastor Jon is preaching from James chapter 3, I'm reading lots of interesting stuff right now, and I hear about a billion words a day from the boys. And my thoughts tonight stemmed from this last point.

Elijah in particular loves to talk... to anyone, but especially to Eric and I and since I'm home more, I am usually on the receiving end of his constant chatter. I'll be honest, it's cute at first, but by about 4pm every day, it gets REALLY OLD. I think it would be different if we were actually having a conversation, but we're really not. He talks and I listen and regardless of how I respond, his chatter remains the same. He is usually in some pretend world making up characters and a story about someone getting rescued or a huge battle or what powers the hero has or what the villain's name will be. He insists on my response and usually tells me what to say and when to say it. This has been going on for years- literally. The stories have changed over time, but the basic concept of pretend play with mommy as a character is still the main idea.

So tonight, we're in the van on the way to evening church- just Elijah and I and he starts. It is a story about police officers and robbers and catching the bad guys. We're about 3 minutes out of town when the story suddenly ends and he says something like, "You know, if a robber tried to steal from me, I'd just tie him up so he couldn't get me."

I said, "You know what Jesus said about people who steal from you?"
"What?"
"He said that if someone takes your coat, you should give him your shirt too."
"What if he already has 167 coats and 485 shirts?"
"You should still be willing to give him yours. That's showing him love."
"So would Jesus make me give away my plane, cause I really like my new plane."
"Jesus might want you to be willing to give it away. He wants to know that He's still more important to you than that plane."
"I want to have my plane and Jesus."
"Don't we all buddy. But we can always know that Jesus knows what's best for us and he loves us, so even if he does ask us to give up something we love, we know that he has an amazing purpose for that, even if we never see it. He wants us to trust. That's a big lesson for a 6 year old huh."
Pause
"Hey, can we talk about something else?"
Sure.
And we were back to talking about airplanes for the rest of the ride.

Later, after church, I realized that if I'm not long-suffering and patient during all of the random talk about his own thoughts, I'll miss or discourage the really important talks like this one. What if I had told him last week, "Hey, can we just have a quiet car ride to church with no talking, just thinking?" (and trust me the thought has crossed my mind) would I have missed our talk today. Would he have started to speak and then stuffed it down assuming it wouldn't matter to me? I don't want to risk missing these talks.

So, I'll try to remember this little conversation snippet this week when he's been rambling on about Pokemon for an hour and my mind is numb. There is a bigger purpose at work.