One of my favorite go to movies as a kid was the 1991 comedy What About Bob.  This classic Bill Murray film pairs Richard Dreyfuss, who plays a conceited psychotherapist with a recluse named Bob Wiley (played by Murray).  It’s so bad for Bob that he can barely manage leaving his apartment let alone function in any other meaningful way in society.  One of the best scenes in the movie is when Bob is attempting to board a Greyhound to New Hampshire.  

In Luke 5 there is a powerful story of a man with leprosy approaching Jesus and asking for healing.  It reads:

One time Jesus was in a town where a very sick man lived. This man was covered with leprosy. When the man saw Jesus, he bowed before Jesus and begged him, “Lord, you have the power to heal me if you want.”  Jesus said, “I want to heal you. Be healed!” Then he touched the man, and immediately the leprosy disappeared (vv.12-13).

Kosuke Koyama, a Japanese theologian, wrote a very fascinating book called Three Mile An Hour God.  Koyama points out that the average person walks at a pace of about 3 miles per hour, which for a kid who grew up in the hustle and bustle of a big city feels like snail's pace.  Using this analogy, Koyama argued that often this is the pace at which God works: slow, slower, slowest. 

In the 17th century, Isaac Newton (building off the work of Galileo) defined his universal laws of motion. One such law was the law of inertia, which stated: “an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” The laws of physics are helpful in understanding things such as motion and movement but they do little to explain a movement.

Parenting might be one of the hardest and yet highest callings that God bestows upon a person.  It is full of unknowns, anxiety, celebrations, surprises, weird smells, laughter, and a host of other emotions and experiences.  Furthermore, the Bible gives us clear instruction on how the gospel is to be applied in our day to day parenting.  This past week as we finished out our series in the book of Colossians, the Apostle Paul gave explicit instructions to parents (and specifically dads): “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged” (3:21).