Jesus is the Tape

My ten-year old son came bounding across the lawn, excitement radiating from his face. I clip a few more thorny branches before standing up to look at him. “What?” I ask, my voice probably a little sharper than I intended.

“Mom, guess what!” He held up his latest craft project. He had taken a small dowel rod and taped a pencil eraser to the end of it to make a rubber-tipped spear. “Mom, I just realized — my spear is like Jesus!”

I pushed the hair out of my eyes to look at his creation more closely. “How do you figure?”

He held up the spear for me to see clearly. He pointed to the shaft. “The stick is like God. Strong and powerful.”

“Okay…” 

He pointed at the tip. “The point is us.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The tape is Jesus.”

“Because He’s sticky?”
“Mom! No. Look!” He pulled the tape loose from the eraser. “Because of sin we are separated from God, right? We long to be together with Him, but we cannot do it on our own. We fall off.” He tips the spear to the side and the eraser falls into the dirt at my feet.

He stoops down to pick it up. “But God sent Jesus to die for us, so we can be together with Him again. Because of the tape — Jesus — we can be together with God, always.” He wraps the tape around the eraser and cements it to the shaft.

His blue eyes sparkle in the afternoon sunlight. “Isn’t that awesome?”

I squeeze his shoulder with my dirty glove. “Yep, kiddo. That’s pretty awesome.”

He walks back to the house, head held high. I turn back to the roses. Suddenly I could care less about getting them ready for spring. Does it really matter? What matters is that our hearts are ready. And my son gets that in a way that few adults seem to grasp. Our gospel is so simple that a child can explain it.

On our own we fall to the dirt. Jesus is the tape. Amen!