My son LOVE trains!  He can't get enough of them.  Where we live, there are train tracks about 1 mile and 1/2 away and every morning around 6 a.m. you can hear the train and it's whistle go by.  And almost every morning you can bet that Brock is standing up in his bed and yelling "CHOO-CHOO!  CHOO-CHOO!"  He also loves music.  Whenever there is music on, he's dancing like crazy, spinning in circles, jumping in the air and landing on his little bottom.  Right now, his favorite music is the theme song to his sister's shows- Spongebob Squarepants and Phineas & Pherb.  He'll get this big goofy grin on his face and start dancin' whenever it comes on.

My daughter loves to dream.  In fact, in just the last couple of weeks, she has decided that she wants to be a teacher, an astronaut, a scientist, and a singer/songwriter.  She has visions of solving the worlds problems, walking on the moon, teaching the next generation how to read, and having thousands of people singing her songs.  She's even tried to teach Brock a thing or two...

Remember when the world was open to any possibility?  Remember when you could be anything that you could dream up?  Remember when anything in this life gave you as much pleasure as a little boy and his train?  What happened?  Why did that stop?  I thought about this yesterday as I sat and watched story after story of our veterans.  I thought about what we've done with what God charged us with while watching the effects of living separate from His love.

In Colossians 1:19-20 we see that Christ's sacrifice on the cross was for the reconciliation of ALL things to Himself.  Not just a personal pronoun, I/you, but all of creation is being redeemed through His grace.  To live apart from that truth is to be something that we are not created to be.  It's in that statement we find (or at least I do) comfort in knowing that it doesn't have to be this way.  We were not created to be this way, He had so much more for us!  And yet, it was us who walked away from that.  In that moment, when man decided that he knew more than his Creator (Genesis 3:6), we began the quick descent into what we've seen throughout our history- life apart from His redeeming grace.

Last night, I went into my daughters room and pulled the covers up, kissed her beautiful face and said a prayer.  I walked into Brock's room and pulled the covers up, kissed his beautiful face and said a prayer.  My prayer was that God would give me the wisdom and strength to show them a different Way.  A Way that was better than what I had just watched.  A Way that leads to His grace.  A Way that would keep that wonder, magic, and hope alive- where they could still dance and love trains, where they could walk on the moon and sing a song on stage. A Way where they could grow up and change their world.

Blessings