The summer sun warmed our car as we waited at the car repair shop. We had turned in our van, and my wife had run inside to see if it was ready yet.
"Dad?" came the small voice from the back seat. It was my four year old. "You have to buckle my seat belt again!"
"WHAT? Why?"
I turned around to confirm what he had said. It was true. Now, this particular buckle was manufactured by an evil person, because I could not do it from my front seat. It would require me to climb out of my seat, open the door, lean over my other son, and buckle the seat belt. I would have to stand in the hot sun!
The anger rising inside me, I threw open the door, yellin...I mean, speaking very loudly, "FISCHER! WHY is it that one minute you can be SO sweet, and the next you are being SO NAUGHTY!!!!"
The next millisecond slowed to an eternity, my words ringing in my head: "WHY is it that one minute you can be SO sweet, and the next you are being SO NAUGHTY!"
I imagine God laughed during my moment of self-realization.
"Well," I thought, "he IS MY son! Here I am calm one moment, and yelling the next! I'm pretty sure God would love to say this to me...over and over again!"
Kinda reminds me of this passage in Romans 7:
15I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
21So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22For in my inner being I delight in God's law; 23but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. 24What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.
