Step Twenty-One: Lessons Learned At McDonald's

Dear Readers,

I met my friend and her two daughters at a McDonald's, and wowsers did I learn a lot! 

1. Use your manners. Okay, so I actually learned this on the bus on the way there... and unlike the majority of the rest of these lessons, this was taught by a high school boy. We were pulling up to a stop where a woman in a wheel chair was waiting with (this is an assumption) her husband. While those sitting in the front grumbled about having to move, and shifted their stuff no body remembered to lift the seats so the woman in the wheel chair could sit. That is when this teenage boy jumped forward and lifted the seats. It was a tiny, self-less act observed only by his friends and myself, yet it gave me hope. As if, this boy's kind gesture said that all is not yet lost in this generation!
2. Be your friendly neighborhood spider-man. When this three year old boy walked in wearing cowboy boots and a spider-man costume, I smiled. What a cutie! However, it was far cuter that he proceeded to "save" all of the girls. The girls, of course, paid him no attention and joyfully ran around playing, and following them was the fearless mini-spidey. Jumping and rolling and pursuing whatever monstrous thing was after them! He was so fearless, so sure of his own ability to save these girls who wanted nothing to do with him! (Hmmm that isn't anything at all like God). I want to be like that little boy. I want to chase fearlessly after that which haunts my friends. I want to pray for them endlessly, and fight on their behalf's relentlessly. I want to be the friendly, neighborhood, spider-man in my own community. 
3. Hug big – really, really, really big. So my friend's daughters are pretty stinking cute! While mom and the older sister went to order ice cream, the little one walked over to me. I picked her up and sat her in my lap, and she wrapped her arms around my neck and squeezed me as tight as a two year old could! I squeezed back. We stayed that way for a good two minutes and then she sat back and I said "you give really good hugs!" And she smiled and said "yeah!" We all need really good hugs now and then, so let's stop with half-hearted one armed hugs and let's squeeze each other tight! If we're offering ourselves in greeting or in comfort then let us offer all of ourselves, as tightly as possible! 
4. Challenge and be challenged to new heights. We are almost always capable of doing more than we think we are. My friend's younger daughter has been learning how to climb to onto these platforms, she would climb up the first two and then she'd stop. I was trying to get her to climb up to the third platform when her older sister scrambled up in front of her. The little one cried "help me sister" but the older one looked at her and said "if your coming up here your climbing up on your own." And the little one? She just climbed right on up! Sometimes we need someone to challenge us. Not in a I'm-better-than-you way but in a I-know-you-can-do-this kind of way. 

So the big lesson of today: keep your eyes and heart open, God is working all around us.