Cowboy Boots

A beautiful day at church yesterday.

A wonderful time of worship,

A challenge by a visiting speaker from China who was imprisoned during the communist reign,

Then, there is my buddy Titus.

He is all of 3 years old, loves the color blue, Thomas the train, and always has a smile on his face.

Yesterday, he made me think.

No, not about Thomas the train.  It was cowboy boots.

He walked up to me after service and proudly displayed the brown distressed leather boots he was wearing for me to see.  I just so happened to be wearing mine that day, and we had fun comparing them, as they matched nearly identically.

What made me think was what his older sister told me a minute later.

She said, "Titus told mom he was going to wear his cowboy boots to church today because Miss. Mary wears hers to church all the time!"

First it made me laugh!

Who would have thought a three year old boy noticed what shoes I wore to church!?

Then I thought, "If he notices the shoes I wear, what else is he noticing?" 

When I taught in Oklahoma it was easy to remember that I was being watched. It was easy to see that my fellow character coaches and I were, by God's grace, lights in the darkness, giving hope to the hopeless.  When the contrast between the environment we were in and the light of God in us was so different, it was easy to remember we were there to minister God's love to those around us.

But here at home,  I need these little reminders that I am still being watched.

Not just by the three year old who wants to wear cowboy  boots, or the girls who sport sparkly green frog earrings, but also strangers in the grocery store, the teller at the bank, the mail man, the neighbor next door, or the group of kids I pass on the sidewalk when I walk the dog.

They are all watching too.

What do they see?

The cowboy boots? Or the love of Christ in my actions?

But be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity. 

~ I Timothy 4:12