No one in my family has ever been at a loss for words. My two children and now my six grandchildren have had a gift for articulation—all of them speaking in complete sentences when they were still two. Once when Alice, my oldest granddaughter was 28 months, she spied a flag in a grocery store and proceeded to recite the entire pledge of allegiance without even stumbling over ‘indivisible.’
The upside of having articulate children is that there are fewer temper tantrums. They can tell you what they want. The downside is that sometimes you hear things you wish you hadn’t. Just before Alice turned three, her parents were disciplining her and appealing to her to do the right thing out of love for them. Alice said, “I don’t love mommy and daddy and I don’t love Jesus, and I’m not going to obey!” Shocking? Well it is what every two-year-old is expressing in the midst of a tantrum. In fact, it is the root of every sin. Every single time we sin, it is because we love ourselves and our own little kingdom more than we love Jesus or anybody else. It just took a two-year-old to articulate it.
Alice is ten now and she loves Jesus and reads her Bible every day. She is a lesson in truth and grace. In fact, her names—Alice Johanna—mean ‘truth’ and ‘grace.’ It is grace that changes our hearts, because we cannot do it on our own. Left to ourselves, we would only love ourselves forever—just like any two-year-old.
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