big change

My girl just came in here to tell me that her brother told her that her favorite color was brown & she was mad because her favorite color in fact is not brown, it is pink.

"Is it true?" I said.

"No" - she responded with sniffles

"Then tell him it's not the truth and then shake it off" and then I did a little shimmy shake dance to, you know, illustrate the shaking off.

She smiled.

What if for your whole life you believed something so strongly that you would do anything because of that conviction. What if you were told your whole life that you were allergic to peanuts - spent your life avoiding all peanut products & things made on equipment that is also used with peanuts.........and then one day you learn that you are not allergic to peanuts. Maybe things within your body changed. Maybe you were never allergic to peanuts to begin with. I don't know. But would you immediately start eating peanuts? I think I would have a hard time. I think all of the years of being afraid of & accustomed to avoiding peanuts would make it more difficult to just jump into a peanut eating free lifestyle.
I read about Paul. No one was more convinced of his rightness that he was. Few people have moved forward in a mission to defend what he believed to be true & honorable. We can all agree that from the outside his ways seemed wicked - but his heart believed that he was defending God. And if Jesus wasn't Jesus, then maybe he was.
Paul, who at this point is called Saul, was on his way to take believers in Christ to prison & he had an encounter with the Lord. Everything changed. Everything he had believed was different. And he didn't run from it.
The truth was so big for him, that he changed his mind. He learned - it says he sat with the disciples for several days.
He was teachable.
That's the word that most people will use to describe my husband. A quality that I am learning from him. A quality that I am seeing my daughter learn from him. An amazing quality.....and rare. So, I guess today I am thankful for my husband.