forgiveness

Fear, Forgiveness and the Pinewood Derby

Photo of Pinewood Derby care modeled to look like the Chicago skyline.Let me not bury the lead:

I DROPPED MY SON’S PINEWOOD DERBY CAR!

Today.  On the cold, hard concrete floor of the garage.  My 10-year-old’s vision of the Chicago skyline, wrought from Sculpey and paint and glue, with a to-scale level of skill and craftsmanship and hard work to rival that of the architects and engineers and steel workers who erected the full-sized Windy City skyline.  Broken — the beautiful thing shattered like glass.

When it happened, I wept like a child — like I knew my child would weep when he found out.

My folly was thinking it needed just one more layer of clear coat varnish.  My folly was holding it gingerly by the tires between my fingers and not firmly grabbing it by its wooden base.  My folly was my hubris in thinking I knew best what his car needed.  And that my age and experience relative to his were enough to prevent harm from coming to his craft.  I was wrong.

What could I do?  I grabbed up all the pieces I could find — I found all of them.  Some had just popped off the base, but some — like the giant Sears Tower (my son’s first experience with America’s tallest skyscraper was NOT in the Willis Tower, thank you) — snapped in three places.  Its twin antennae — as much a part of the building’s signature as it’s boxy-tubes shape — had snapped off as well.

I mixed up some two-part epoxy and started putting the rolling Humpty Dumpty back together again.

When I finished, I felt like I’d done a good job restoring his fantastic job.  We would have to make new antennae, but the main of the Chicago skyline was restored.  I did my best.  But …

Would he notice?  It didn’t matter — I knew that I would tell him.  How could we team up together to design and build the car in a values-based program like Cub Scouts and have me try to sneak something like that past him?

Would he be shattered, as his car had been shattered?  Yes, I knew he would be.  And when he came home from school and I told him, he was.

But by  God’s good grace, kids are resilient and unlike many of the “more wise” adults around them, kids are also generous with forgiveness.  My son calmed himself and listened to my apologies, listened to my pledge to help him repair it, and listened to my assurances that we could make it look as good as it had when he’d put the finishing touches on it only the night before.

He forgave me.  And he taught me about forgiveness.

Tonight, the car gets checked in.  Tomorrow, it will glide downhill at up to 350 (scale) miles per hour.  It might win.  It might lose.  And it might fall off the track and shatter again.  But having experienced the tragic and having recovered from it together, I know for my son and me that whatever happens tomorrow, everything will be o.k.

UPDATE Jan. 30, 2013:  My son raced the car, and clocked speeds at more than 216 miles per hour, against winning cars that sped downhill at almost 230 m.p.h.!  He stayed on the track, and while a couple antennae broke again (clearly the car’s Achilles’ heel) in the racing, it didn’t shatter on race day as it did for me.  Best of all, while others’ bested his cityscape for speed, his design took Best Design honors — cracks and glue and all!

THE END
Copyright 2013

~

Deep Thoughts From the Shallow End of the Pool features essays from PR, business and life, which means they might be as random as any of the rest of the content on this site!

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin?

 

Love all Sinners

All have sinned. Love them all! How can you NOT with a sweet face like that?

You’ve heard it said that you are to “love the sinner but hate the sin.”  This common Christianese phrase has a basis in Biblical truth, and is recited by church people as though it was red-letter text.  But there are some problems with its use:

1) First, it’s decidedly NOT Biblical.  Similarly worded, but decidedly different in meaning — and in bona fide red letters to boot — is the following:  “You have heard that it was said, “love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” — from Matthew 5:43-44.

2) It’s hypocritical.  ” … He straightened up and said to them, ‘Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” — John 8:7.  ‘Nuff said.

3) It’s divisive and judgmental.  Yes, there will be an accounting for all shortcomings … I will spend a lot of time recounting my own personal sins (ugh!) …  As fallen humans, we ARE our sin, so when we condemn sin, we condemn the lost we are trying to reach with God’s message of grace and mercy.  That turns people off, frankly.  It turns God off, too — in Proverbs 6:16, when the Bible describes seven things the Lord hates, “haughty eyes,” and “a person who stirs up conflict in the community,” are prime among them.  So until His return, we of the church need to try harder to be about His love and forgiveness.

And of course, like most Christianese, using the phrase usually displays a lack of critical thought, and instead is simply something that we’ve heard and parrot to others.

THE END
Copyright 2014

~

The Faith Deconstructed category offers an occasionally thoughtful, sometimes glib, always faithful look at today’s Christianity, from the perspective of a reformed skeptic.