Sunday Night with Anne Badger

Do you ever get tempted to play favorites?

Lately I have been thinking about importance….There are different meanings to that word; it can mean priorities and favor.  I have been thinking about both. 

I suppose when it comes to priorities, I am not great at keeping it all together.  For example, I don’t always get a quiet time with prayer first thing in the morning.  I try but sometimes my son wakes up early, so I cut my time short.  I also don’t have the house looking picture perfect, either.  Many times, my home looks like a cross between Toys R Us and a laundromat!  It seems no matter how much I do, I am always a load of laundry behind and a tub of toys behind! 

This morning, during carpool I found myself thinking about how sometimes we look at people as being important.  For example, when you were a kid, you had a favorite teacher.  That teacher taught you everything and helped you believe in yourself.  You became a better person based on the time that teacher invested in you. 

As we go through life we face circumstances and challenges where we are tempted to believe that our security and worth are based on what other people think of us.  Meaning, if you don’t have the approval of a certain supervisor or the ear of a certain friend, you are not good enough.  Our insecurity becomes an open battleground for the “prince of lies” to come in and make us believe we are worthless.  Joyce Meyer calls this “stinking thinking.”

But God doesn’t desire us to feel unfavored.  In fact, when we live our lives for Him, we ARE ALL His favorites!

My security, therefore, should be rooted in who the Lord says I am.  I am chosen, holy, consecrated, set apart, deeply loved, the Bride of Christ, and fully accepted by God.

I am His favorite.  (and so are YOU!)

When you think sweet 16, you usually think of someone turning 16, or maybe the College Basketball playoffs.  And those are both good things.

However, my favorite new definition for those two words is summed up in a little story….

Every morning, before school, I go into wake up my 6 year old son.  He’s a good sleeper, and appreciates the value of someone waking him rather than an alarm clock.  So I go in and scratch his little back, kiss his neck, tell him it is time to get up.  Sometimes it takes me drawing pictures on his back and having him guess what it is to wake him.  That is one of his favorite things!

But my favorite moment, bar none, of the morning is when I tell him I need a backpack.  He gets on my back and I give him a piggy back ride downstairs. 

We have 16 steps in our house.  Each time I step down with him on my back, he kisses my shoulder. 

I was talking to a friend from college today about how incredible the love between a mother and son is.  Don’t misunderstand me, I love my husband…however, I discovered a new meaning to the word love when my son was born.

He’s getting to that age where he doesn’t want to kiss me or hug me anymore, so that first event of the day becomes a huge deposit in my memory bank.  And I like to think that it makes his day alot better than the annoying beep on his Superman alarm clock.

There are moments I find myself transported back into time.  It usually has to do with my kids.

Holidays are when the present and the past get intertwined in a beautiful, tapestry of memorable moments.  

Easter is no exception.  In fact, much of my tapestry of memories come from Holy Week. 

These past few days I have taken a few traditions and done them with my kids.  Today, we dyed eggs.

As I began to boil the water, my mother came over, “Why didn’t you put the eggs in cold water and then boil them?” she asked.

Apparently, there’s a lot to doing this I didn’t know.

Still, it was fun to make a few memories with my kids and recall the days of my youth when I did the same thing.  

As I type this, my children are playing “Go Fish.”  I remember playing card games in this same house with my grandmother.

My Easter traditions have varied over the last few years.  We try to spend time in the Hill Country of Texas with my parents, go to church, and do an egg hunt on my parent’s front lawn.  That is when the memories really kick in because as a child I ran that front lawn with all of the beautiful oak trees and searched for eggs like a detective.  I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss a one.

But Easter is not about eggs….and like a time detective, I want to ask you to pull a few files out of your memory bank.

When was the last time you really thought about what Easter really means?  What Jesus really did to set you free?  If you are anything like me, you find yourself going through the busy-ness of life, and even though you pray, do a Bible Study and/or Devotions, you often take the beauty of the price He paid for granted.  I catch myself doing this sometimes.

Today, we went to an Easter party and the youth minister went through the Resurrection Eggs, which tell the story of what the Lord really did for us.

I teared up when I saw little children tell the youth minister what each egg represented.  I also pray for my six year old who says he has made a decision to follow God but has not yet been baptized.  I am so thankful that we did not choose Him, but that He chose us.  All we have to do is accept Him.

May the Lord bless you and yours this Easter!  May you realize that accepting Him is the greatest gift you could ever receive.