Norah holing out the "I'm the big sister" pin Anna wore when Norah was born... Now Norah gets to wear it!

Ownership

Lately Anna has been drawing Pocahontas and John Smith. See, we recently got the Disney movie through Blockbuster Online and it is simply the only movie the girls want to watch right now. As a result, I have had the song Colors of the Wind stuck in my head for the past week and a half…

How high the sycamore grows,
If you cut down, you’ll never know!
And you’ll never hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon…

I don’t really know what a blue corn moon is, but that song is pretty catchy and seems almost noble right here around earth day… Anyway, Anna loves drawing John Smith with Pocahontas and not only are the drawings really cute, but she’s really pretty proud of them. I love to see how Anna’s art has evolved… how people used to be boxes with dots and now they almost always have all of their appendages, eyelashes and even accessories like earrings! The cool thing is that when I pick her up from Sunday School or some other child care place, I can always pick out her drawings from all the rest. They look like her. And I don’t mean they look like her style of drawing. I mean, they really sort of look like her… like her personality and her heart. These drawings are always very colorful and full of emotion… just like Anna.

I was reading the other day in the Gospel of Luke where some dudes were trying to trap Jesus to get Him in trouble by asking about taxes… They wanted Him to come down on one side or the other about a heated political issue so that He would get in big trouble with somebody. “Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” He saw through their duplicity and said to them, “Show me a denarius. Whose portrait and inscription are on it?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. He said to them, “Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

Luke tells us that they were not only unable to trap Him, but that they were so astonished by His answer that they became silent… You know, I think they were silenced because they understood what He was saying to them about ownership. The coin looks like Caesar. It has his name on it. It was stamped out in his image. By his power and authority it was made and is, so it belongs to him. Give it back to him… And in the same way, you were made by God in His image. By His power and authority you were made and are who you are. There are things about you that are like Him because He made you. You are His completely. You belong to Him.

It is my belief that if we really understood the concept of ownership… that we belong completely to God and not to ourselves, everything about our lives would change. Jesus actually has a double claim on us because not only did He make us, but He also gave Himself to buy us back, and this is redemption. First He formed us, then He actually purchased us. We are totally His. In a way, we can be like Anna’s drawings: if only we gave Him what is rightfully His… we would change and start looking more like Him too.


Here's Anna... pretty pumped about a lady bug she made with play-doh.