When Kids make you Proud

I’ll have to admit that I’m proud of our children.  The youngest, Stephen, a nineteen year old, is still at home and attending junior college.  Recently he was squeezing into a parking place at Jim & Nick’s Bar-B-Q and bumped a 2004 Volvo side mirror with the mirror on his Tacoma.  Naturally, there wasn’t even a scratch on the Tacoma while the Volvo had some cosmetic damage.  He had a friend with him and they waited till the owner came out, to confess about the damage.

The Volvo owner was a Vestavia Hills fireman and was very impressed that the boys didn’t just leave like most people might.  They swapped info and the guy called me the next day with the damage report, almost nine hundred dollars worth.  He said it was obvious Stephen was a good kid who handled himself well.  Sadly, it just so happened that $900 was the exact amount in Stephen’s savings account for his next semester.  Stephen met him at the downtown fire station the next day and they swapped the money for the local dealer’s estimate, verifying the damage amount.

It was an expensive lesson and one that won’t be soon forgotten.  It’s funny that I was the one who was the angriest, and I’ll explain that.  My wife and I had been trying to encourage Stephen to attend the college Bible class at Westwood Baptist church for quite some time.  That week he met a new friend at college, in one of his classes, who attends Westwood and agreed to visit with him.  The whole Bible class decided to go to Jim and Nicks for lunch, after church.  Turns out, the restaurant was so busy, that the only available space was the one he had tried to squeeze into, everyone else had already arrived and were waiting outside.

So why was I angry?  It wasn’t at Stephen for trying to squeeze into a parking place where the other car was over the line…  it was at God, for allowing it to happen in the first place.  I apologized to the Lord for that, but it was just one of those “life isn’t fair” moments.  On a day when Stephen finally attends Bible class (we always attended worship), he scratches a mirror and does the right thing by owning up to his mistake and it wipes out his bank account!

Working for AT&T,  I’m very familiar with those “life isn’t fair” moments.  I do hate it though, when it happens to someone so young.  Those are the times when many would say, why did I go to church this morning?  Or worse, I’m never going back again.  Stephen did neither! He went back the next Sunday and has been faithful ever since.  The “good guys” are hard to find, glad we’ve got one!
“A wise son brings joy to his father”  Proverbs 10:1

Originally published April 20, 2012 at Thechestnutburr.com