Yesterday,
I was going to be God’s not-so-little helper. Yep, I was going to give God a
tiny bitty hand. My three year old had come to me yesterday, his face looking
like someone had cancelled Christmas.
“Mommie, I can’t find Rory!” he’d
wailed. “I’ve looked everywhere for him, but he’s disappeared!” he said,
thrusting out his lower lip and fighting hard not to burst into tears.
My
son has an obsession with racing cars (which I hope he’ll get over really soon)
and he’ll spend hours on end either playing with his toy cars or watching any
car related cartoon. I even caught him once, totally fixated on the TV,
watching a Formula 1 race (helping him get over that obsession is probably another thing I’m willing to help the Lord with!). How he even
managed to tune the TV from CBeebies to Formula 1 (loun loun!) is still beyond me. Of his collection, Rory was his
favourite (at least for the next two weeks or so until another one catches his
fancy) and I could imagine how devastating
losing his precious Rory was to him.
“Mommie, can we pray that God will bring
Rory back?” he asked earnestly and my heart constricted in my chest. My sweet
little boy knew to pray about the little things! That’s a lesson Mommie can
like to re-learn oh!
“Yes darling, we can do that.” I
replied.
When
he went to bed last night, he told me that he wasn’t sad anymore because he
knew that when he woke up in the morning, Rory would be back on his shelf with
his other cars. I believed him absolutely because Mommie was going to make sure
of it.
That’s
how last night, I drove to the 24 hour ASDA not too far from the house and
marched resolutely to the aisle that I always eyed evilly because it was the
cause of many trips over toy cars, the incessant noise of whirring toy engines,
a blocked toilet (don’t ask!) and a wrecked vacuum cleaner. You won’t believe
it but last night of all nights, not only did they not have a Rory racing car,
they did not have any toy cars at
all! Panicked, I asked the guy stocking the shelves adjacent to me and he smiled
apologetically at me and said “Oh, we
just ran out.” Imagine! They didn’t run out all those times that my son
made me buy car after car after car oh! They didn’t run out the time he dropped
not one, but THREE cars into my shopping cart and I didn’t find out until we
got to check out, mba. They didn’t
run out the time I stood my ground and told him NO and all the other shoppers
turned to look at me like I should have had a special feature on Bad Moms, iro oh. The one time that I actually carried
my two legs waka come, to willingly buy a car, a whole ASDA did not have! Did
these people even realize this was a matter of heavenly urgency? Were they
trying to sabotage my son’s prayers? I know he will one day have to grow up and
realize that life doesn’t always go the way we want it to, but biko, that day
wasn’t today!
I returned
home, racking my brain trying to think of an explanation to give him when he
discovered his prayer had not been answered. I tossed and turned all night,
fuming at the audacity of ASDA, running out of racing cars of all things. Awon alai nikan shey!
When
I went to wake him up this morning, what did I find clutched in his fist? You got
it right, a shiny red Rory. I just stood there and stared. It was a truly
humbling moment, seeing the truth that my little boy had the simple faith I
lacked. In trying to help God fix the
problem, all I’d succeeded in doing was waste my time and my fuel and my peace
and a good night’s sleep. God had answered the prayer while I was running
around ASDA like a headless chicken. As was with Sarah, God had looked into the
future and had seen beyond Isaac all the way to Jesus, while Sarah was still
busy prepping Hagar for the job.
Did
I learn a few lessons today? You bet! The most profound of them I think is this:
God-sized problems don’t fit mommie-sized hands.
