keep on!

Yesterday came with a small, encouraging and humbling moment, and I wanted to share it here for all of you parents, teachers, grandparents, spouses, pastors, co-workers, faithful friends and persevere-ers who may frequently think and feel that all the work you are doing to share Jesus may just all be in vain. 

It's not. 

When I got home from work yesterday, Sofie asked if we could please, please, please PUH-LEEEZE do a mommy-craft, because we never have time.  I grabbed a stack of white paper and a box of crayons, cut the stack into great big eggs, put Nora in her high chair with one and slid the others in front of Lily and Sofie.  

"You too, mom!" Sofie insisted, so I cut one for myself.

I was kind of shocked to see all three girls diligently working away on their "Easter Eggs", which I told them to color and decorate any way in the world they wanted.

I was thinking about jelly beans, I was thinking about dying Easter eggs as a kid, I was REALLY thinking about Easter chick peeps, I was thinking about searching for Easter baskets as a kid and how I wished I could go to Target and get Easter baskets for my kids, and I was even humming "Here comes Peter Cottontail" for them, trying to remember the words. 

Coloring pastel stripes and zig-zags on my egg, picking up crayons for Nora and marveling over how into this easy craft the girls were, I looked over at Sofie's egg.

There was a lot going on, as there always is in Sofie's world, but while the egg was still mostly white, at the bottom in sparkly gold crayon was Jesus, with either crazy hair or a spiky crown, on the cross.  

Touched, I looked at Lily, just as she asked, "Is it He HAS Risen or He IS Risen?"  

My girls were not thinking about jelly beans or Peter Cottontail or what they were missing from Target.

The girls were both thinking about EASTER, which to both of them, immediately, meant Jesus.

We've been telling them and teaching them and guiding them and reading to them and praying for them and raising them for years now trying to bend the focus of the world, bend the focus of sin, bend the focus on self and point them to the truth.  

I've been telling them and showing them a million times and ways over the past years (at least 998,000,000 of those I thought they were totally ignoring) and hoping and praying that one day the utter beauty and heartbreak of Easter will be totally entwined in who they are.  I pray and hope and persevere that their days, their weeks, their months, that Christmas, that Easter, that their LIVES would be all about following their Jesus.  

And I will continue until the day I die, even as Sofie is jumping up and down on her bed while I read the Bible stories, even as Lily is groaning and rolling her eyes because she knows ALREADY, mom!, even as Nora is singing, "No more monkeys jumping on the bed 'cause YESH, Jesus loves me!", I will continue.

Because they reminded me yesterday that training them up in the way they should go, that showing others Jesus, that pointing to the cross, to the empty grave, is supposed to take a long time and be a lot of work and take a lot of faithful...but when I asked them to color Easter eggs like I was, they thought very first about Jesus.

Keep on, weary ones.