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A New Friendship
Renee dabs a splosh of yellow on her paper. She drags the splosh from one end of her paper to the other in a high arch.
“Wow. I like your rainbow,” Jodie says.
Renee smiles. She dips her paintbrush in a cup of water and swirls it around, stirring all the yellow paint off its bristles. She looks at Jodie’s easel.
“I like your penguin,” she says.
Jodie creases her forehead. She looks at her easel, then looks back at Renee.
“That’s not a penguin. It’s an elephant. That’s my favourite animal. It’s a surprise for my mummy.”
“Well, it looks nice,” Renee says.
Renee puts her paintbrush down and tugs at Mrs Bellingham’s dress.
“I need the loo. Can you help me?” she says.
A Small Deed
That’s how it started. Everything seemed fine. Jodie and I, or whatever her name was, had enjoyed playing together at preschool for a couple of days now. We’d made mud pies in the mud pit and slid on the slippery slide, then painting caught our attention. What went wrong? I’ll never know now. I didn’t ask, but when I came back from the toilet, I discovered Jodie had unpegged my picture, turned it over and pegged it back onto my easel.
At first, I had thought I stood in front of the wrong easel, but as I looked around for my picture, I realised that, no, the easel in front of me was mine. As I recall, when I flipped my paper back over, someone had painted a brown swirl over my picture and when I looked around, wondering who’d done it, Jodie stuck her tongue out at me, and said, “Nah, Nah,” making it clear our friendship had ended.
It hurt, but, how, I thought. How can something so small, like flipping a picture back the front, wound like that? It’s not like she punched me in the guts. It’s not like she kicked me in the shins. It didn’t require a proclivity for meanness. It was a simple, small act that even a child could perform, but somehow it hurt so much. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn mentions small hurtful acts in his book, The Gulag Archipelago. It’s a book describing the treatment of prisoners kept in Russian concentration camps last century. He says that all though prisoners suffered many cruel and unusual punishments, many acts of torture involved simple small actions requiring no propensity for cruelty. In fact, even a child could perform them with no feelings of remorse.
For instance, one torture involved serving prisoners salty food without any liquid refreshments. What’s hard about that? No blood, no guts, no bruises, no broken bones. It doesn’t require that the perpetrator jackhammer a streak of viciousness or bore a vein of villainy they hadn’t known laid dormant in their hearts before now. When you think about it, it’s even quite a festive act. Serving thin, cold, weary, starving prisoners salted herring and cucumbers? That could make you feel wonderful. Look at them devouring it. Until you remember, you must not give them anything that could relieve the thirst that will soon tear up their throats.
Do We Do The Same?
I know when someone sins against me, it hurts. I know sometimes it hurts so bad I cry. I don’t know if God feels pain when we sin against Him, I’m not enough of a theologian to know that, but I know sin offends and angers Him, even acts that look small. Take for instance, the recent trend of spelling God with a lower-case g instead of a capital. This seems so small. It doesn’t require any malice or overt acts of violence or destruction. In fact, it’s something a child could do, perhaps because this sin is so childish.
Some people omit this courtesy because they’re texting, hurriedly tapping out a comment with two fat thumbs, but others do it on purpose. For example, Australia’s mainstream media, on their primetime news coverage, these days, spells God with a lower-case G. In the past, western media news outlets at least gave the impression of striving at delivering truthful, accurate, well-written and well-spoken news stories. Correct grammar and punctuation were a give in, but now, talented, university-educated journalists and reporters omit spelling God with a capital G. How childish. How God must laugh. “That’s the best they can come up with,” He must think.
But the Bible says this won’t amuse God forever. The book of Exodus states that God will not hold those guiltless who take His name in vain. It’s called blasphemy. That’s when we don’t give God or His name the due reverence He deserves. Blasphemy can seem like a small sin, which committing doesn’t require much malice, but our God is a big God. He’s done massive things for us. He created a big universe and has given us big blessings, the biggest of which is the offer of eternal life through the forgiveness of sins which He achieved by laying down His life on the cross for us.
These small, childish acts people commit these days might make them feel big, but it reveals how little they are. It shows how small their understanding of sin is, how small their understanding of God is and that all their attempts at hurting God can only ever be small. It’s like throwing pebbles at a giant skyscraper. Pebbles can’t damage it. Pebbles can’t destroy it. In the same way, You can’t damage God. You can’t destroy Him, so it's best you confess your sin now. Please repent and start obeying Him from now on.
Exodus 20:7 NKJV
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