Silly Bands

I'm sure by now you know what Silly Bands are, but if not let me inform you: They are mainly bracelets, although there are rings now as well. They come in farm animals, dinosaurs, and musical instruments. You name it and there is probably silly bands for them. It's very popular in schools to collect and trade them. Now there's even a Christianized version of them called "faith bands". Leave it to someone to try and make a Christian imitation for a few bucks. Justin has some of them, why they are popular with middle school boys I have no idea, and Katelyn has many as well, I believe she's acquired most of Justin's. Now with that background in place, I can tell you what happened the other night.

Katelyn was told to not have silly bands at the table during dinner. After a few minutes she thought that didn't make any sense so she decided to play with them anyways. Well, this caused Stephanie to confiscate them, or try to... What happened next was complete pandomonium. Katelyn ran upstairs screaming "I want my silly bands, I want my silly bands". I'm sitting there thinking "this is going to be a long evening". We eventually get the silly bands from her and have a long talk about how she won't be getting them back soon. This was after her slamming the bedroom and closet door, which led to a spanking. She was crying so much over losing the silly bands that she almost threw up and her nose was running like crazy.

While talking with her, I told her that we love her very much. We wanted her to have 'things' to enjoy. We wanted her to be happy with her silly bands, but when it came time to be obedient to us, she needed to obey and put the bands away. I asked her if she knew she was getting into trouble by not putting them away, she said yes. She knew all along that she was getting into trouble and did it anyways (sounds a lot like you and me huh). Gradually throughout the evening she ended up eating her dinner, drawing some pictures and having a nice night.

The point of this post is not to talk about how sinful and evil my daughter is. My point is that I don't think that we are much different. Sure, it may not be silly bands, but there's other things that we don't want to give up. And while we may not scream out loud, cry and pout, that's exactly what's going on in our hearts. It's crying out "I want, I want, I want, I want". So the next time you really want something and don't get it or have something you think you can't live without, just think of silly bands. It may not last as long as Katelyn's episode with her silly bands, but it does happen, even for a split second sometimes. We act like kids only bigger and the silly bands change to __________. It may not be bad in and of itself and neither are silly bands, it's our hearts that's the problem.

We can either acknowledge that we really are this way and seek to know our hearts better, ask the Lord to show us our shortcomings, cry out for forgiveness through Christ, ask Him to change our hearts, or we can ignore it, pretending that it's only other people that are like that, or we can admit that we're that way, but think that we do so many other things that are good, that the good outweights the bad.

Which is your response?

by the way: Katelyn now has her silly bands back and she doesn't play with them at the table, at least she didn't last night. :)