God Beyond My Periphery | Decepticon's, Cobra's, and Other "Bad Guys"
My parents
were very selective with the toys they let my brother and I play with when we
were kids. We were allowed to have
Transformer toys, but we could not have any Decepticon’s; only Autobot’s. Similarly, we were allowed to have G.I. Joe
toys, but we could not have any from the Cobra crowd. Decepticon’s and Cobra’s were the bad guys
and they stood for what was wrong with the world. On the cartoons, the bad guys characterized
meanness and anger. They talked with harsh
tones. They appeared to despise
things. They stormed in and out and
slammed doors. They broke stuff. They sought to trump the prevailing power of good
with evil in their respective kingdoms.
They were evil and my parents
wanted our example to be good.
I remember
the day that example was shattered.


At some
point, probably after an eternity or so, my Dad turned and marched toward the
front door. He stormed out and slammed
the door so hard the walls shook. I was
startled by the crash of my Mom’s curio cabinet, once hanging on the wall, now
lying on the floor. She quickly grabbed
it and left the room crying. My brother
and I probably went on playing.
Indeed, I suppose I should have been playing outside in the backyard. Had I been, I never would have experienced the evil of the “bad guys” in such demonstrable display. However, seeing what I did drove a reality deep into my soul. I learned that meanness and anger exist outside the context of Saturday morning cartoons. I learned that sin, in its entire broken array, was real and it exists in people close to me; people who fought mercilessly to guard me from it, even amidst my whining in the toy aisle for a Cobra character. I learned that sin plays no favorites, makes no exceptions, and hurts at a level deeper than what I feel when I fall off my bike and skin my knee.
(This is the third post in a series of posts called "God Beyond My Periphery." These posts are a series of stories; remembrances really, of times and seasons throughout my life that God used, beyond my direct view to shape me spiritually into the man that I am today. Click here to read an intro, the first story in the series. Click here to read the second story in the series.)
Awesome example and insight into the difficulties of parenting. As young parents one of our first was toy guns. We struggled with the decision to buy Caleb toy guns our not. We decided to not He found a stick . :(
ReplyDelete