P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

PASSING OVER A $10 ROCK

In the book, Restoring the Village, author Jawanza Kunjufu tells the confessional story of a kid named Jerome. He was a freshman in high school with a pretty girlfriend named Kathy, and they were struggling with all the hormonal challenges teenagers that age have surging through their veins and arteries.

Well, one lucky afternoon their school dismissed early for a teachers’ meeting. For some amazing reason, Jerome just happened to forget to mention this to Mom and Dad, and he and his little girlfriend headed over to the conveniently empty house. By his own admission, “We weren’t planning to study.”

Well, but there was a next-door neighbor named Mrs. Nolan. Good old Mrs. Nolan. Just as the two teens were heading up the front steps, anticipating the physical paradise that beckoned from inside, she poked her head out of a window. “Hello, Jerome. You’re home awfully early.”

And the kid, thinking fast, said very subserviently: “Yes, ma’am.” And he quickly improvised a story about reviewing algebra problems, and how they were going to be calculating “the square root of ‘B’ squared minus 4AC, all over 2A,” etc. In other words, he gave her a big mathematical fish story.

Well, dear Mrs. Nolan saw right through the quadratic quagmire being spun by her young friend. And she kept right on him. “Does your mother know you’re home this early . . . and do you want me to call her?” She just plain and simple had the goods on him, probably remembering back to her own freshman year.

And you know, this Jerome gave up, overpowered by superior forces. “No, ma’am. I’ll go inside and call her while Kathy sits on the porch.”

Many years later now, thinking back about it, this lawyer makes an amazing admission. Because after all, this is just the tiniest of confrontations, a brief nudge on a front porch. Twenty seconds. But he tells the author:

“Mrs. Nolan saved our careers that day. If Kathy had gotten pregnant, she might not have become the doctor she is today. And my father had warned me that if I made a baby, the mutual fund he set up for me to go to college or start a business would have gone to the child. I’m glad Mrs. Nolan was at her window, looking out for me.”

With that in mind, it’s a pretty good book title: Restoring the Village. And even if you weren’t a huge fan of the author of another book entitled It Takes a Village, you couldn’t argue with this observation for parents shared by Hillary Rodham Clinton:
“‘Significant’ moments arise out of long stretches of togetherness that may look uneventful to us but are crucial to helping children develop, both emotionally and intellectually.”

“Little things,” she also points out, like a stimulating environment, can raise a kid’s IQ by as much as 20 points. The Association of Booksellers for Children, hopefully with some unselfish motives in mind, promotes a program called “The Most Important Twenty Minutes of Your Day . . . Read with a Child.” In the book, The Culting of America, Ron Rhodes shares this story about good nudges, and the effects of “spiritual compound interest”:

“A young successful attorney once said, ‘The greatest gift I ever received was a gift I got one Christmas when my dad gave me a small box. Inside was a note saying, “Son, this year I will give you 365 hours, an hour every day after dinner. It’s yours. We’ll talk about what you want to talk about, we’ll go where you want to go, play what you want to play. It will be your hour!”’ ‘My dad not only kept his promise,’ he said, ‘but every year he renewed it — and it’s the greatest gift I ever had in my life. I am the result of his time.’”

You know, we could spin back and forth on a topic like this. On the one hand, an hour a day after dinner is a lot of time for a busy, hard-driving executive. I mean, this guy needs to unwind. He needs to relax with Monday Night Football and C-SPAN. He needs to finish up that paperwork he brought home from the office, and get on the Internet and reply to those five unanswered e-mails. Can he really give a whole hour a day to this kid — in contrast to the 37 seconds a lot of dads devote to their children?

On the other hand, a total of 365 hours in an entire year isn’t very much time at all. Just barely over 15 days. Stacked up against a whole lifetime, those couple of weeks spent with just one kid aren’t what you would think would shape a life to any huge degree.

And yet remember what we’ve been saying. That boy will grow up to be a man, who will hopefully be saved in God’s kingdom and live forever! He’s going to be a godly, renewed, spiritual . . . new creature . . . and he’s going to be it for a long, long, long time. From that perspective, is two weeks of games, and hikes, and discussions, and tossing a football in the backyard a waste of time or perhaps the greatest investment a dad could ever make?

I mentioned earlier this week an observation by C. S. Lewis, where he writes:

“All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.”

Meaning either an eternity with God, or an eternity away from God. In the same essay, entitled The Weight of Glory, he adds this:

“There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”

You know, that is an unbelievable thought. Right this very second, you and I are on battleground turf. The land, the buildings, the institutions, the airwaves, and especially the people . . . are all targeted by God, and equally targeted by Lucifer. God looks at that boy — maybe a high school freshman like this Jerome we just talked about. God knows in His divine mind the incredible, holy, regenerated man — a heavenly man — He intends for Jerome to be. And for this kid whose dad is so busy, but who plans to give his boy an hour a day. Listen, God wants these boys in His forever kingdom. He’s targeted them for salvation.

But Lucifer has also put them in his demonic gunsights. He’d like nothing more than for Jerome to get embroiled in an unwanted pregnancy. To be trapped in a spiritually numbing cycle of premarital sex, of using girls for selfishness. To slowly begin spinning out of God’s orbit and into his. This boy with the busy dad — wouldn’t Satan want to see that kid get neglected after supper each night? To start thinking that fathers never care, even a heavenly Father?

I’m reminded of a Bible verse which teaches us the significance of these “small things.” In Matthew 9:29 Jesus takes us to maybe the tiniest sermon illustration He ever came up with, except maybe for the mustard seed. (Come to think of it, we could use that here as well.) But listen to this:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?” Or “a farthing” is maybe how you remember it. “Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.” “Not one of them dies without God noticing it,” says another version.” And even the very hairs of your head are numbered.” Then Jesus puts things in perspective by adding: “So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” “A whole sky full of sparrows,” says the Clear Word.

I think writer Debbi Fields captures the essence of this Bible verse well when she says:

“There is no such thing as an insignificant human being. To treat people that way” — insignificantly — “is a kind of sin and there’s no reason for it. None.”

I guess we used to say, “Wow, them’s fightin’ words.” And they are. They fight with the way we tend to look right past people. We see kids as nothing more than “small people.” Small in significance, small in value, with their skateboards and their body piercings and their video games and graffiti. But friend, God sees them with eyes that factor in the miracle of eternal compound interest. God sees them as godly, as transformed . . . and maybe transformed because there on the porch, you intervened. You spent that hour with a kid after supper, and left it to God to calculate the dividends.

We’ve gotten several great stories over the years from Leadership magazine, and here’s one to close on. Wanda Vallasso of Dallas, Texas, submitted this one.

“A gem dealer was strolling the aisles at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show,” she writes, “when he noticed a blue-violet stone the size and shape of a potato. He looked it over, then, as calmly as possible, asked the vendor, ‘You want $15 for THIS?’ The seller, realizing the rock wasn’t as pretty as others in the bin, lowered the price to $10.”

That’s about how we look at some folks around us, isn’t it? We bargain them down from fifteen bucks to ten, and even wonder if we could whack it down to five. But here’s the rest of Wanda’s true story about that ten-dollar rock.

“The stone has since been certified as a 1,905-carat natural star sapphire, about 800 carats larger than the largest stone of its kind. It was appraised at $2.28 million.” Then she adds: “It took a lover of stones to recognize the sapphire’s worth. It took the Lover of souls to recognize the true value of ordinary-looking people like us.”