The Best Thing That Happened To Me Today

I wish to announce that we've turned a great and momentous corner in our household.  For the better part of a year now I've been smooching my little daughter Ali, age 1-plus-change.  She's a good little smoocher but, much to my chagrin, was never an easy target for daddy kisses.  She likes kissing her mommy.  She loves kissing her stuffed animals, particularly the cats.  In fact they were the first thing she ever kissed voluntarily.  She'd toddle up to her little cat, wrap her arms around it, and say, "Mooww!" (like a cat's "Meow" noise).  Then she'd give it a great big wet one.  But daddy?  No way.

I've gotten plenty of kisses from Ali before.  But I always have to con my way into them.  Since I don't look much like mommy I would have to pretend to be a stuffed cat.  Sometimes I would hold the cat in front of my face and then switch really quick when she leaned in to kiss it.  Sometimes I would make her laugh by saying, "Mooww!  Mooww!  Mooww!" and pointing to my lips like I was a cat myself.  Then I could sneak a smooch.  But the event always involved plenty of asking with a little bit of trickery and deceit.

But then, just yesterday, I was standing in the living room talking and all of a sudden my little girl walked up to my feet, stuck her hands up towards me, and said, "Mooww?"  I looked at her like, "What???  Really?"  Then she stuck her hands up again and said, "Mooww!  Mooww!"  So I picked her up and she gave me a great...big...kiss.  She did it all on her own, of her own volition.  Yaaaayyyyy!  Daddy is happy.

This reminds me of one of the great lessons in evangelism.  If you have something good to share, if your purpose is noble, if you really care about the people with whom you are sharing, then a little bit of patience is not too high of a price to pay to get to that eventual goodness.  Like smooching, evangelism is about a relationship, not just an act.  Intent and desire have to come from both sides.  Sometimes that takes being gentle.  Sometimes that entails waiting.  You don't give up.  I didn't cut off my relationship with Ali just because she wouldn't kiss me, otherwise she never would have learned to!  In fact I kept at it, little by little, sharing the "good news" of how fun it was to kiss daddy, doing it in ways she could understand and accept.  But my big first kiss moment wouldn't have come if I had just plowed through our relationship insisting on nothing but, as if her intentions and desires didn't matter.  Instead we built trust day by day until that day when she saw that it really was a good thing.  And in the end, the patience and the investment in the daily relationship made that Big Smooch moment all the more special.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)