delusions of grandeur
Overall, the Thanksgiving break was lovely. We visited my parents in Chapel Hill this year and enjoyed a relatively small dinner, with only Gran, my aunts Jeri and Cheryl in attendance in addition to our family and my parents. Turkey was great, as were the other dishes and especially the bean dip, something Diane prepared at my behest this year even though it’s not typically Thanksgiving-ish.
After we returned Saturday night, we went to see the drive-through Christmas light display at nearby Tanglewood Park. The lights themselves were extensive and gorgeous, as they have been the past two years we’ve been. However, Luke was in full-on brat mode and Penelope has the attention span of a mosquito (and was up past her bedtime besides), so from a parental perspective, the outing was, um, difficult. Pen is two and we can’t expect a whole lot from her given her age and the circumstances, but Luke’s a different story.
We recently checked out a book on manners from the library. It’s a little old for him, but it has cute illustrations of good and bad manners in various situations and I thought it would be good to get him acclimated with politeness and rudeness in everyday life. It didn’t turn out quite as well as I’d hoped, though—Luke is much more interested in acting out all the ways to be rude, rather than their counterparts. In other words, it gave him a truckload of new ways to test his parents and push the envelope. Kids really are naked, living proof of the desperate condition of the human heart without the Lord. Not only that, the current situation with Luke is a perfect illustration, in a microcosm, of our sin nature’s response to “the Law” as described by Paul in Romans. The more rules we’re given, the more our nature will chafe against them. As Paul says, “Is the law sinful? By no means!” The rules aren’t corrupt or flawed—the condition of our hearts and minds is.