24 October 2010

The New Boy

The following occurred on Monday Oct 18th, around 8:20 pm and is taken from my journal entry written that night.

When I tuck my boys in at night I always pray a similar prayer over them.  It goes something like this:  God bless this boy.  I pray You would give him a heart like Yours.  I pray that he would learn to love You with all his heart and to love other people like you do.

I had just finished praying this over Caleb when he said "Daddy I feel something touching me.  It feels kind of rough."

I had painted a scene of a knight fighting a dragon on Caleb's pillowcase and thought it might be the rough surface of the fabric paint bothering him, so I asked if that's what it was.

"No," he said.  "It feels like a hand.  It's touching me on my head and on my shoulder."

This seemed very strange, so I asked him, "What do you think it is?"

"I think it's God," he said.

Now I'm a bit cautious when it comes to children and conversion experiences.  I truly believe children can be saved at very young ages and know people personally for whom this is the case.  However, I don't want my boys to have a false conversion just because someone has told them they need to do it.  I don't want them doing something just because their friends are or anything like that.  I want them to realize what they are doing, and I want it to be authentic.

So I was very cautious as I continued our conversation.  I didn't want to give Caleb a bunch of leading questions or fall into a ritual that was nothing more than him parroting me.  I tried as much as possible to let him find his own way, as I said, "What do you think He wants?"

"I think He wants to bless me."

I was also trying to understand all this myself so I asked, "What do you think He wants to bless you with?"

"He wants me to ask Him into my heart, Daddy."

At this point I just wanted to get out of the way and let the Holy Spirit and Caleb work this out.  I didn't want to do anything to mess things up.  I asked simply, "Caleb, what do you want to do?"

He closed his eyes and said, "Holy Spirit come into my heart."  Then he looked at me and smiled.  "Daddy, He did!"

After that I talked to him about what he'd just done.  It became obvious to me that he did know what the death of Jesus was about.  He also mentioned Jesus rising on the third day, and coming to live in his heart.  I feel so blessed to have been there for that.

He kept saying, "I feel joy in my heart."  I tried to get him to go on to sleep, but he wanted to tell his mama.  I told him she'd be home later and that he would see her in the morning and could tell her then.  (She was up at the school getting things ready for their Fall Festival.)  At any rate, I left him in his bed and told him goodnight.

Every ten minutes or so, he would come out of his room and ask if she was home yet.  He was up until 09:40 when she finally came home.  He told her, "Mama, I'm a new boy!"  Then I filled her in on what happened and together they started calling everybody to spread the good news. 


Peace.

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