A Late Night and My Sweet Little Terror ...

Well for any other Agassi fans out there I'm sure you can relate to my late night! It was an exciting night in Flushing Meadows, NY last night as Andre Agassi defeated the 8 seed, Marcos Baghdatis last night in 5 sets to move through to the 3rd round at the US Open. After nearly 4 hours of tennis the match ended at about 12:45 a.m. But considering that every match at the Open could be Agassi's last of his career due to his retirement after this tournament, it was well worth the late night for me!

So moving onto other things ... my sweet little boy decided to entertain me with another one of his messes this morning. I was upstairs in the kitchen cutting up watermelon and honeydew to take along this weekend and Justin was downstairs playing by himself. Being as I can't post every single mess this boy makes, I'll give you a quick overview of his messes in the basement in the past couple weeks. One time he managed to find a large box of Brian's screws and dump those all over the basement, another time he found a large container of wire nuts and had those all over the place, and most recently he managed to find a box of Brian's 9V batteries that he uses for Church and took out every single battery (about 72), then took off every single cap off of the ends of the batteries, then of course had the caps and batteries all over the entire basement. That one took awhile to clean up since he took all of the caps off! It would be one thing if Justin would dump them in one pile, but somehow he managed to get things all over the place!

So anyway, due to him recently finding Brian's things, I've tried to put things up high or back in the unfinished part of the basement where Brian stores his things. Well, I probably should've thought through the fact that since there is no door knob or lock on that door yet, it wouldn't be too hard for Justin to make his way back to that area and get into things. But I didn't think that far in advance. So back to my story about this morning ... I had been cutting up fruit for awhile, so decided to go down to check on my little guy (who was playing so quietly ... I should've known better!). So I go downstairs to find Justin sitting back in Brian's area ... and what is he doing you may wonder ... he was emptying out Brian's large craftsman tool chest (the one with about 12 drawers ... of course Justin can only reach the bottom 5 or so. Not only the tool chest, but also a couple of boxes with odds and ends. Let's just say there is quite a big pile of "stuff" down there. If I knew where everything went I'd clean it up myself, but that would probably be more unhelpful, so I figure I'll let Brian at it when he gets a chance. It will give him a chance to re-organize!

Amazing that with a whole basement full of toys, he is rarely actually playing with those toys! He finds great joy in making messes and destroying things ... the Lord obviously gave me my sweet little terror to rip down all of my idols in the area of organization and structure that I can crave so much. Although I realize that organization and structure are good things (after all, we serve a God or order!), I am learning that they aren't the most important things all the time. And although we want Justin to learn not to be destructive with things and treat things with care ... I can often get frustrated even when he's not destroying things, but instead just making messes ... because when it comes down to it, I don't always feel like cleaning up after him! How kind of the Lord to give me Justin as a son, not only because he's so much fun, but because through him I am daily being sanctified! I pray that I will always "laugh at the time to come" (Prov. 31:25b) because although I know those times to come may include cleaning up many more messes, they are all wonderful opportunities to train up my son in the ways of the Lord.