Say What?

A dinner time conversation at my house earlier this evening:

Me to one of the boys: “This year you’ll actually have to do a science project. We should start thinking about what you want to do.

Drew: “Maybe we can ask your Grandad P. for ideas.”

Our son: “I could make a bomb!” Sigh. Yes, this is my child….

Drew: “No, you could go to jail for that.”

Our son: “How come?”

Drew and I explain about how they can’t bring weapons to school or even pretend to for various reasons. Long explanation I won’t go into for the sake of this post. And we also talked about how it would destroy other people’s property.

Other son: “But how can the Army make bombs if you’re never allowed to?”

Drew: “That’s different.”

Followed by more long explanations.

Drew: “Kids used to blow up toilets at schools sometimes.”

Much laughter by both boys.

Drew and I both sternly warned the boys that vandalism is a very bad thing.

One son: “What is that?”

Me: “Destroying other people’s property.”

One of the boys: “I thought ‘evandalism’ was a good thing.”

Me: “No, it’s bad.”

Then Drew looked at me and tried not to laugh. “Evangelism…..”

Me: “Oh! Evangelism is good – that’s telling people about Jesus. You’re right. Vandalism is wrong.”

Dinner at my house is interesting.

On second thought, ‘evandalism’ might be a fairly apt term for the damage we leave in our wake when we become so arrogant and full of ourselves that we hypocritically lose our compassion when dealing with those who are straying or lost spiritually or, on the other hand, when we are too undiscerning to recognize false teaching and allow it to run rampant in our churches and affect our own thinking because we are not grounded by a solid Biblical understanding of the truth. Just a thought.