“THE HULK”
Some of you will remember when churches were involved in a bus ministry. Almost every church had a bus.
We worked with a congregation that had several buses; and we had teams that rode the buses, teachers that taught the children in class, and even some that had children sit with them during the worship service. Some congregations had special services for just the bus children.
I was teaching a class of first and second graders during our summer Vacation Bible School, and we had a very large group of children attending. They were fairly well behaved, except for one little boy.
Jason had been diagnosed with a brain tumor when he was only two, and the doctors told his parents he would not live to start school. He had surgery to remove the tumor, and the parents began preparing for him to die.
The parents were very permissive with Jason. They allowed him to do whatever he wanted to do. So as you might expect, Jason was a discipline problem.
One morning at the beginning of Bible class, Jason was being disruptive in class. He wouldn’t sit still, and he would not stop talking. I had to pick him up to keep him from hitting another little boy. When I did, Jason stiffened and said, “I am going to turn into the Hulk.” Then he held his breath; and I watched as his face turned, not green like the Hulk, but red.
I was shocked! I wasn’t sure what I should do; so I tried talking to him, telling him that God loved him. He replied, “I don’t love God.” What do you say to that?
What happened next surprised me, and it surprised him. Tears filled my eyes, and I tried to tell him that God loved him even if he didn’t love God. Jason couldn’t understand why his statement would make me cry.
Eventually, Jason learned to love God, his teachers, and Bible class. He wasn’t perfect, but he learned to be reasonably well behaved. We discovered that he became frustrated when he couldn’t color or write his name like the other children. He had never been taught, because his parents thought he was going to die and didn’t need to learn those things.
Christians are often like Jason. We sometimes aren’t very well behaved; and we respond to our fellow Christians, our friends and neighbors as though we don’t love God. We often give the impression that the Bible, the church, and religion in general is not first in our lives. Surely God must look down on us with tears. Then He loves us in spite of our behavior. He gives us another chance.
As we begin 2016, we need to look at our lives and evaluate our attitudes, our decisions, our friends, and our priorities. Do we love God? He loves us!