Honoring others with loving kindness

This morning Julian was practicing his ABC's a bit more. This time I could make out more letters. He'd sing some letters real clearly and then mumble through. It sounded something like ABCD mumble...HI..LMNOP mumble...RS...now I know mumble mumble.

I got a lot from today's study. I read 2Samuel 9. If you remember back to when David and Jonathan's friendship grew, Jonathan had him promise to always remember his family with loving kindness. In this chapter David honors that promise by calling for anyone in the house of Saul. It turns out that Jonathan's lame son Mephibosheth is alive and David seeks him out. David honors him by granting him the land that had been Saul's and the honor to always eat at David's table. Mephibosheth was amazed at David's kindness. This was huge for in that time to be disabled you were looked down upon and even shunned. David accepting Mephibosheth without regard to his handicap can be compared to how God wants us to come to him as we are and he loves us as we are. This is true friendship, for David to bestow this honor on Jonathan's son even though Jonathan had long ago passed. This makes me think of the prayer of my friend today, to have love for difficult friends who don't give to you on the level that you give. While a natural reaction would be to pull back and give less, her prayer touched me to love them even more. So that is a prayer that I have too, since I need God's help in doing that.

Once again David and his men are in battle, this time with the Ammonites. Although the Ammonites gathered foreigners in addition to their own army, they were still overpowered by David and his men and they surrendered.

During lunch today I had bible songs playing in the background. They remind me of some of the songs from vacation bible school when I was a kid so it's fun to pass them on to Julian. He liked when I was singing "let my people go", which is part of a song about Moses leading the Israelites to freedom. I asked if he wanted to hear about Moses and he said "yeah" so we got out his bible and I read the story of Moses. On each page he'd point to Moses and say his name and then go "wow". We'd finish and then he'd ask to read the story again so he was really into Moses today.

We had some play time in the basement. We played with the music set and Julian was shaking the hand bells singing "Fish fish fish" song from Elmo's world. Then he drummed a little bit too and handed me a maraca to play along. Then he found a red bowl and he said cook. I said, "are you going to make soup?" He said "no, pancakes". So I got out the playdoh and we flattened out some pancakes and he put them in the bowl to "cook". He'd take one and make chomping sounds pretending he was eating it. This was fun since he doesn't do a lot of imaginary play yet.

I had a tough workout at the YMCA today. I don't know why it was so hard since I went on the same elliptical machine but it felt much harder so I only did 15 minutes on there and did the bike for the other 15. Julian had no problems in the nursery today. When we dropped him off he actually put his arms out for Megan, a staff person, to pick him up. He'd never done that before and I could tell she was pleased.

Tonight I could tell Julian didn't really want to go to bed even though this was a night he goes to bed later since we have our workout at the Y. I had to herd him upstairs by picking a couple of his favorite books and luring him upstairs with them. After writing the blog it's now my turn to wind down and go relax a bit.