Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Family

For the past 3 days, I have been visiting my family. I have 4 rowdy nephews here, along with my kids. It is a houseful! In all honesty, there have been a few times when myself or another adult here have gotten a little "testy" with the boys. It's hard to manage 5 silly boys at the same time!
Tonight was a little different. I had an absolute BLAST with my nephews! My son went with me to get ice cream sandwiches from DQ for everyone. While ordering he was sitting on the counter. Next thing I knew, he was alseep on my shoulder, but still sitting on the counter! Needless to say, I was sort of excited, because I thought that meant I could sort of relax since my child was down for the count. However, that's not how the night turned out.
As I was sitting downstairs trying to watch my favorite TV show, the boys were all there with me. They were a little hyper, so I had to think of a way to calm them down during my show. I explained to them that if they were quiet during the show, that on commercials we would have competitions.
It was great! We did head stands, balancing,pushups, situps, etc. I wasn't expecting them to stay interested for so long. We even ended up playing some races too! We had wheel barrel races, three legeged races, and crab walks. I laughed so hard, and was so excited that they stay so interested and got along so well. No one fought, no one cried or got hurt, it was amazing.
This led me to some scripture on family tonight. It says in 1 Timothy 3: 4b "If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God's church?"
After tonight, this statement meant a lot to me. I always seemed to think that I was capable of doing lots of things in a volunteer status at church, and that I was fairly good at them. However, I often doubted my ability to "control" all of my nephews at the same time. And these kids were my own blood! Weird, isn't it?
I realized tonight that if I thought positively about situations such as managing and enjoying the time that I have with my 5 crazy, silly, wonderful nephews, things can go a lot smoother. I need to be able to understand and connect with my own family, so that I can take these skills and connect with strangers that come into the house of God in which I volunteer. Ineed to make positive impressions on these children's lives, and show them that I love them, relatives or not. I AM a child of God, and I CAN take care of my family!

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