Have you ever listened to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion on public radio? He ends the storytelling part of his weekly variety show with the descriptive phrase about a fictional Minnesota town, “That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Garrison, you wish. I have read some very compelling research analyses by expert social scientists who prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that 50 percent of all children score in the bottom half of their classes in academics, sports, and family income. Mr. Keillor is a true Minnesotan, and as such usually given to the admirable Minnesota traits of humbleness, modesty, and understatement. He asked his mother once, “Am I good-looking?” she replied, “You’re good-looking enough.”
Some children are cursed with absent parents; others are cursed with helicopter parents, i.e., hoverers who pressure their kids for top grades, enroll them in every sport and activity they can find, hire academic tutors to get their kids into elite colleges, and seem to need to live vicariously through their offspring. Were you an elite achiever or an ordinary kid? Do you have kids? Do you fear that they are ordinary?
I would like to celebrate ordinary kids today. Like most parents, I pushed pretty hard on mine to be like me. Since I like playing the piano, I made our first three take years of piano lessons. The fourth was allowed to take violin and then trumpet. They were all unwilling. In spite of all my pushing, do you know how many piano players, fiddlers, and trumpeters Carol and I have today? Zero. I had to learn to let go and let them find their own way. They learned to love music in their own way—two are fine singers, one’s a guitar player, and one’s a terrific drummer.
Some kids know what they want to do and pursue it single-mindedly. Some kids drift along into their 30s, working a lot, but not yet settling into a career. Perhaps your kids are super achievers. I clap and cheer for you. In reality most kids aren’t. We need to conceal our disappointments, stay positive, stay hopeful, and let them find their thing at their speed in their own way. Two of my favorite authors, James Michener and Rex Stout, didn’t start writing until they were 40.
Two of Jesus’ half-brothers became great leaders in the church: his brother Jude wrote the fiery little one-chapter epistle near the end of the New Testament, and James was a double achiever. He was both the leader of the mother church in Jerusalem during times of terrible testing and persecution and he wrote a powerful five-chapter epistle on how to live a Christian life. What about the other two? Of Simon and Joseph we know nothing. Were they ordinary?
Not all of Jesus’ disciples were in the elite either. How would you like to be known as James “The Less”? Can you tell me anything achieved by Thaddeus? I’m sure that God used the gifts and talents of each of those men, as well as those of Jesus’ brothers and sisters, in important ways. But they didn’t lead the pack.
So here’s to all you late bloomers, C students, and music-lesson dropouts—God loves you, and I do too. As Theodore Roosevelt once remarked, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.”
Original content by Time of Grace.
