“Supportive”

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By:  Staci Stallings

This past week was Spring Break around here, so I think I forgot to post on Thursday.  Sorry about that.  I was having too much fun with my kids!

Now my youngest is an 11-year-old with tons of energy and even more creativity.  His thing is electricity and electronics.  Now, before you go patting me on the back for what I’m about to tell you, please note that most of the time I do what I do with him with a great deal of fear and trembling.  I thought for a long time that God simply gave him the wrong mom because frankly electricity FREAKS ME OUT!

However, I have learned as we’ve been talking about that to be a Holy Spirit friend (or parent), you’ve got to learn to call out the best in the other person, and thinking that they are going to burn down the house or otherwise trash your living room with a project does not “calling out the best” a reaction make.  I am learning and having to learn to stop projecting my fear onto him.  I’ve learned that doing so will stop his creativity in its tracks because he wants to please me, and clearly a mom who is freaking out is not pleasing to anyone.

So I have learned to BREATHE, and trust that #1 he knows what he’s doing and he’s really not trying to be destructive, and #2 that God will place in our path the right person to guide him at all junctures–especially if safety is an issue.

Well, this week over Spring Break, we watched a fascinating kid online who had created his own radio station out of parts he found in the dumpster in his very poor country of Siera Leon.  My son was hooked!  He wanted to create a radio station too.

Now, for those of you out there who know about such things, don’t worry.  I’m not going to be fined thousands of dollars for him broadcasting out of his bedroom.  Like I said, God puts the right people in our path.

However, what my son HAS done is set up a station complete with microphones and a mixer and a speaker.  He uses his iPad to record intros and between-the-music pieces.  And now, he practices… for hours at a time in his room.

It was so funny the day he told me what he wanted to do, I told him I had something I thought he could use.  Unfortunately, it was buried in a drawer we almost never use, so getting to it took moving all kinds of stuff and then digging in that drawer.  With that room in a complete shambles, I pulled the piece of equipment out in triumph, and my son said, “You know, you are so supportive.” (Remember, the kid is eleven!)

I disentangled myself from the debris and said, “Oh, yeah?  How’s that?”

He said, “Well, most parents would say, ‘A radio station?  Why would you want to build something like that?’  Not you.  You start pulling stuff apart to find things to help me. I think that’s cool.”

Cool and supportive.  I kind of like that.  It’s how I think we should be with each other a lot more often!