My Little Knuckle-head
A little knuckle-head came to visit me the other day. I call him knuckle-head because he is the type that makes people want to give him a rap on the head with their knuckles.
He hadn’t been in the house two minutes when he spied my glasses lying on the table. Now I admit I should not have left my glasses lying around, but it turned out to be a great “Garden of Eden” test for the little rascal. He immediately picked up a small rod and started lightly whacking the glasses. I loved it.
His daddy is a fine man that got saved while incarcerated in the prison where Mike ministers. His daddy has become well founded in the Word. Now that he is out of prison, he has had to get to know his son all over again and learn to be a parent.
I could see right off that Knuckle-head needed a cheerful training session (and the Daddy as well). First I looked in the daddy's eyes and asked, “May I play mama for a few minutes?” Since he had no clue what to do, he gave me the go ahead. I miss having little ones and take every chance I get. I then went to the little rascal and, smiling, I leaned across the table and took the whacking stick from him. He gave me a full toothed grin with the only remaining front tooth. He is six years old, you understand.
I couldn’t help but adore the little guy; no doubt he depended upon that. But my brains are bigger than my heart, so I whacked him once across the offending hand with his whacking stick, while telling him in a pleasant voice not to bother the glasses. Never losing eye contact, I could tell he seemed to think he had run into a knuckle-head bigger and more interesting than he. I laid the whacker back down beside my glasses and with one last smile walked toward the kitchen. I only got a few steps when he again whacked my glasses. “Haw, haw,” I said with a twinkle in my eye, “You are not supposed to touch my glasses.” Before he had time to lay the offending tool aside, I had grabbed it up and delivered my next (much less gentle this time) whack.
Now, if the whack had been delivered in a stressful attitude he would have been emotionally and physically wounded. If he had been dragged from the room and given time to become hysterical, all training would have been obscured by the trauma. His little brain can only decipher so much info at one time, and the emotional trauma of being taken into a strange room by a stern adult would make anyone’s brain short circuit. Instead, he remained at the scene of his offense, getting smacked by the very implement he had used to commit the offense—and this without any anger or emotional rejection. I could clearly see it was a new experience in the little rascal’s life.
