The Student Becomes the Teacher...or Why I'm the Proudest Mommy Ever

Today, my heart is full...overflowing even. My son has made this mama so proud. More than normal toddler stuff, which always makes me proud and happy...he has blown me away.

Last year, on Mason's birthday, we started these "intentional acts of kindness" - doing one for each of our years on our birthday.  I saw another woman do it and, while I love doing these kinds of things throughout the year, the thought of spending your birthday focusing on others instead of yourself seemed like a brilliant way to reinforce the fact that we are here to serve a bigger purpose.

Mason had a blast with it, and has continued to remind me throughout this past year of that day and suggest doing more things. It's opened the door to some giving opportunities that I don't think we would have taken advantage of before. It's opened his eyes to the needs of others and caused him to intentionally look for chances to help and serve others. He's shown me in little ways over the past year how it's stuck with him and has been processing...but a few weeks ago, he astounded me at how much it had really made an impact in his sweet little heart.

I had come up with a list of ideas for his birthday acts this year. I was listing off my ideas one night after picking them up from daycare and was going to let him choose his 5 things. I had searched and searched, thought and thought, worked so hard to come up with a good list of 8 things that would work well for this day so that he could pick out the ones that he connected with. I picked out things we could fit into one afternoon or evening. Things that he would enjoy doing so that he would want to do more acts of service going forward. Things that fit my idea of how the day needed to look.

Then Mason called me out on all of it.


After I read my list, I looked in the rearview mirror to see his puzzled little face and hear "but Mom, you don't have anything on your list for helping homeless people!"

How do you respond to that?

I said, "I'm sorry sweetie. Is that what you wanted to do?"

He said (in his completely hilarious 'my mom is being an idiot' voice), "Well, yeah!  There are a lot of people without homes and I wanted to do something nice for them!"

Point received.  Dagger in gut of selfish, still inward looking mom. 

This precious 5 year old made me realize that, even in trying to establish a pattern of service within our family, I wasn't thinking big enough. I was both embarrassed and proud at the same time.

We've had to re-work his day of service around the new ideas that this conversation brought about. We've got a community that has rallied around my boy and donated items for this project that we'll carry out next week and I am so very thankful and excited to see him go through with this!

We've spent hours talking about doing nice things for other people because God loves them just like He loves us. But I've been holding back.

I've focused really hard on how to get the kids to ENJOY serving, so that they would WANT to serve in the future. I've eased them into things, tried to just dip their toes in the water of being intentional with showing Love to the world.

Mason very pointedly brought it to my attention that I wasn't doing what was right. Thank goodness for honest little boys with soft hearts and big ideas.

May I never miss out on an opportunity like that again. May I have faith like this child of mine and show Love to the world just like he does when I get out of his way.