A couple of weeks ago Christina and I were invited by some friends of ours, who are contemporary Christian musicians, to go to a sort of undercover church to hear them play some of their new songs. They were playing a place called the “Coffee Spot” in New Port Ritchie, Florida. It’s a little coffee shop with a stage for live bands and performers.
Now, for those of you aren’t familiar with my one year old son, Sebastian, let me give you a little background… Sebastian is high energy! He’s like a 2 foot tall tornado. He’s little but he is full blast all the time… So after arriving everything was fine for a few minutes.
Sebastian was entertained by the youngest daughter of our friends for a while and then he took a few bites of his dinner… but once the opening act started is when everything fell apart. The opening act was a miming evangelist!
Remember that this whole place is not much bigger than the size of a maybe a two car garage. So when they introduced the mime, everyone in the room got quiet… everybody that is except Sebastian… He spent the next 10 minutes of this mimes performance doing everything he could to escape my arms to get to that mime…
It got so ridiculous that I finally took him down a little hallway toward the emergency exit of the place and tickled him ruthlessly for minutes at a time… his laughter was bad, but at least he was in the back of the place and he wasn’t attacking the mime!
So, after the mime finally ended his act… our friends went up to play. Wrongly assuming that Sebastian would sit our laps and listen to the music we sat down at a table in front of the stage, I with my frozen-blended-vanilla-late-frapachino foofy coffee and Sebastian with his mommy feeding him a from a delicious jar of sweet potato baby food… which he was soundly rejecting with flails of his head from side to side to avoid allowing any of the food entering his mouth…
So, by the time an hour or so had passed Sebastian had thoroughly embarrassed Christina and me, he had attacked a mime, charged the stage trying to get a guitar – or anything else in reach for matter – screamed his head off and managed to get sweet potato all over the table and his mother and I…
Finally the music stopped and I knew it was over… we would be leaving and at last I would get to just take a drink of frozen-blended-vanilla-late-frapachino foofy coffee!
And as I picked up my cup to take a drink I realized, much to my surprise, that where only whipped cream had once been to top my coffee was a big splash of sweet potato. So there I sat; Sebastian on my lap looking up at me with his infectious smile with sweet potatoes in my coffee…
And as I sat there in this moment that seemed to last forever, it occurred to me that the sweet potatoes in my coffee were evidence of Sebastian’s presence in my life.
Those of you have kids or been around small children know that you don’t have to look very hard or for very long to find the evidence of them in your life.
From the foreign flavors in your coffee… to the grape juice stains on your carpet… to their little toys decorating your once clean living room, their presence is easy to detect. It permeates your life; so much so that within just a few weeks of their arrival most of us can hardly even imagine your life without them.
God is our loving father… our oddities… our failures… our inadequacy… all of this is like sweet potatoes in his coffee…. They are the evidence of our presence…
God’s love is infinitely greater than the love of any earthly father. God is a loving father who postpones judgment and is merciful to us.
I want to encourage you to choose to see yourself the God does. When God looks at you He doesn’t see a defeated person, full of doubt or discouragement… He sees the wonder of His creation… He sees your infectious smile and all that is beautiful about you.