Ben and Me

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, so Madison wanted to watch something patriotic - but short - tonight.  The reason for the 'short' part is because we have art camp starting tomorrow morning, and we'll be getting up a bit earlier to go to that.  Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise!

Which is an appropriate thing to say, given our choice of a movie:  we watched "Ben and Me" tonight, which clearly shows us that a mouse named Amos is responsible for a good bit in American history.  Ben Franklin found him to be irreplaceable, and Thomas Jefferson found help from Amos while writing one of the most important American passages ever.  It's a fun cartoon, and it sort of set things up for us as we were spending a good bit of the day preparing for the arrival of family tomorrow, and the celebration that is the Fourth of July.  As such, you can imagine the noise that was going on the last few nights with fireworks and so forth.  As they've only recently become more legal here in this state, the amount of going off has dramatically increased to the point that this weekend and New Year's Eve are some of the most explosive days around.  One can only imagine the fireworks industry getting together to spin other holidays a bit, in order to include more fireworks.  More fireworks means more money, so why not?  So there they are considering it:  For Valentine's Day, your spouse still brings fireworks to your heart.  This Father's Day, remember dad with an $80 package of fireworks (a $150 value!).  Don't let your Thanksgiving be a turkey:  give thanks and explode a few of these bad boys in the sky!

Anyway, the best we can do here in this house are sparklers.  We didn't have time to do that this year, given that we're going to art camp and had to get to bed earlier this week.  One year, Daddy bought a version of the Titanic that exploded slowly.  It was so weird I had to get it.  The smoke stacks shot out rockets (which they called signal flairs), and there were about five different 'phases' to watch.  The final phase involved a glow within the boat, which could be seen through all the tiny translucent 'windows' on the side.  It didn't cut off abruptly at the end, but instead faded out, I guess signifying the passengers' fading hopes or something?  It was pretty unusual.  So I bought it, and set it off at the airstrip up where our grandparents live.

Changing the subject, this morning was the last Sunday service of KidPak for our Superheroes series.  As tomorrow is the Fourth of July, we went with Captain America as our theme hero, and of course his shield of faith.

Madison and the other kids enjoyed the service, including Daddy's illustration:  he brought up a kid to illustrate what happens when you don't have a shield of faith, versus what happens when you do.  It was amusing, as Daddy was pelting our volunteer with 'lies of the enemy,' little wadded up pieces of paper with lies on them.  The shield of faith deflected each one, but only if you used it!

The service was fun as always, with lots of characters and of course the ending of our four-part movie that we filmed for Summer Xtreme.  This was a big deal, and the kids were very excited to see it.

You might suspect the good guys saved the day.  And there were some great lessons learned along the way, lessons about grace and about who deserves saving.  The truth is that everyone deserves saving, and it isn't our place to judge that so much.  Our place is to follow the Great Commission, and bring the Light of the World to everyone we can.    And then - just like those on screen counterparts - we can be … Heroes.