Bear Hands and Hero's

I was reading a story to my son recently, a story filled with anger, lust, selfishness and deception, a story that he loves!  I came to the part where Samson kills a lion with his hands, his bare hands in the road.

Linc looks at me and says, "You be va lion and I'll be Samson and defeat you with my huge bear hands!"  He raises his arms at me showing the claws and the pads his imagination has now cloaked his tiny hands with and yells with a William Wallace style groan, "Veese are my bear hands and I will defeat you lion!"  

After a moment of composing from my laughter my explanation began, "Samson didn't have hands like a bear buddy, it's just an expression (oops, big words just come out sometimes)."

With a voice that trailed up from the start he asked a question, "So the lion had bear hands?"  I'm not going to lie, the image popped in my head of a lion walking around on its back legs with the paws of a bear, that's a serious animal!  I love the logic of my son - Somebody in this story has hands like a bear because that would be freakin awesome!

After a disappointing conversation and a weak explanation of bare vs bear we continued the story, and yes we played Samson and the lion.  Of course I held what a miserable failure Samson was, the same way I hold on Noah's drunkenness, David's adultery, and the rest.  

Ahh the tempered story of death and disaster that we tell our children to teach them the Bible.  I'm not against it, I am the chief of it!  My son's favorite game, other than 'battle' is David and Goliath.  I bet a day hasn't gone by in the last year that I haven't fallen at the hand of his sling.

But everytime as I crash to the ground I wonder when I will shatter his hero, that David does not represent him slaying the giants that will arise in his life.  That Samson is not a story to teach me I can be strong in the Lord, but a picture that even with the gifts I've been given I am a failure and need a Saviour in Christ.

So tonight, as usual, I will take a stone between the eyes, ask him by whose strength he was able to defeat me, and then land on top of him with squeals of laughter and tickling fingers as he tries to shrimp out - hoping with everything I am that he will be a man after God's own heart and not just a hero in his own mind like his father.

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