Daily Devotion

by Bill Lucke

Question: What do I want to be when I grow up?

Long, long ago, Sylvia and I were active in Lutheran Marriage Encounter. As part of this, we would exchange letters that responded to an assigned question. This was, in part, my answer to this one. 

The question was meant to be open enough to allow almost any type of response. My first thoughts (coming at the end of the week) were that I could see no reason to grow up because grownups had to be responsible and were not allowed to give up when the game stopped being fun. That sounded really dumb to me. Life should be all Maui and Pittsburgh where I can be an authority figure who gets to say things that people believe. There should be no place in life for printers that are too slow, networks that go off line or JetFax’s that lose transmissions and won’t tell which ones they were. I shouldn’t have to reschedule vacations or have a boss who calls on Sunday to ask how to dress on Monday. When you grow up, you lose the right to keep the good part of the deal and pitch the nasty bits. I don’t want to give that up.

Then I went to the pond this morning and spent a half hour watching the muskrat, the carp and the world’s largest blue jay. I looked at the flowers I couldn’t identify and sent hand signals to the bugs so they could fly in the right places. At the same time, I was planning how to express my frustrations in this letter. It was hard because I wasn’t frustrated anymore.

In my new state of mind, I see that the question is what I want to be, not what I want to do.What I want to do is to go to the pond at 7:30, not get into the car. But what I want to be is someone who is welcome at home (or even at work). I want to be accepted as I am, sick or well, clean or dirty, wise or foolish. This is the gift God gives each of us and that we give each other. It’s the gift we hope to get from our children; I suppose to be fair, we should give it to them also. That may be going too far.

1 comments on article "Daily Devotion"

Danelle Buelsing

Bill, this is a beautiful statement: "This is the gift God gives each of us and that we give each other." It is a powerful force in a family and in a Christian community. Thank you for sharing this.

4/11/2021 10:44 PM

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