When I was a young boy my family had a furniture console that occupied much of our small living room. It looked like a big chest with doors and fake drawers. It housed an AM radio, a record player that queued three long playing vinyl albums, and a little black and white Zenith television that got three fuzzy channels fourteen hours a day. Tubes glowed like eerie light bulbs buzzing loudly in the cavity behind drawers that wouldn’t open. I chuckled when I saw one on the Internet recently.
Everything is preserved on the Internet. For kicks, I searched and found a number of old programs I used to watch as a kid. Some have been digitally colored. It was an amazing adventure that brought back great memories.
Art Linkletter’s House Party was a thirty-minute weekly TV program with a segment called, “Kids Say the Darnedest Things”. It’s incredible that we can pull up interviews that were staged fifty years ago. The children featured had no idea what they were doing. Their words came from an unfiltered immature heart. It made me ponder some of the things my grandkids spout off. And that led me to recall things my own kids said when they were small.
I can still see my kid’s faces as I replay those special moments in my head; the innocent curious looks, and the mean defiant ones. I was surprised how much I could recall, and how vividly I remembered what was said. It made me reflect on my own childhood encounters with my parents and grandparents. How I made them laugh, and how I must have made them cry. I’d like to take all the hurtful moments back. But I can’t. And neither can you.
We love our kids so we’re able to cling to the good we cherish and forgive all the things that broke our heart. Likewise, our Heavenly Father captures everything we say and do. He delights in the moments we made Him smile. And He loves us so much He chooses to look beyond the moments we were spiteful, mean-spirited, or disrespectful. Father, forgive your children. We know not what we do.
