Young Examples

Over the weekend we went to a play at The Adobe Theater entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" I wrote a blog Monday about this play and some of the lessons and questions that came from it. Today, however, I am writing about a different experience we had at the play.

We had gone for my mom's 50th birthday so there were a lot of us, 14 to be exact, and the theater, which is pretty small, it only seats about 90, was completely sold out. From the moment we got there the lady taking the tickets, who was, I guess, in charge of the place, was complaining about how large our group was and how she had no idea how we were able to get such a large group in, and we had no idea how difficult it was for them to accomodate us. This was quite confusing because: 1) We weren't sitting all together taking up entire rows in the theater. No more than 4 of us were sitting together in any one place. 2) We just called and bought 14 tickets...I'm not sure what was so difficult about that. Would it have been easier if 14 people had individually bought the 14 tickets? I mean come on. We were not that difficult...

Anyways, the 2nd thing that this lady did was immediately pull Manda and I aside and tell us that this was an adult play and she was not worried about what Mallory was going to hear, but what the 90 paying customers were going to hear from Mallory, and the moment she started to make any noise we would have to leave the building. Now I can understand letting us know that if Mallory was loud we may be asked to leave, but the way she approached it was like Mallory was a horrible intrusion and the paying customers shouldn't have to endure her. I think she kinda forgot that Mallory was one of those paying customers and 13 other paying customers were with us... So this was a little annoying, but it got worse. She then came up to us on 2 more occassions and told us that Mallory should not be there, that she should not have been invited, that there were so many things wrong with our reservation, and got upset at us because we told her that an empty seat next to us was Mallory's seat. She told us Mallory could not have a seat, even though we had paid for it, and she should not be at the play. Keep in mind, this whole time, Mallory is being perfect. She's not crying screaming, being loud in any way. This lady is making much more of a scene than Mallory was.

Anyways, we got to stay in and the play started, and continued for 3 hours. During that time, Mallory watched intently. She loved it. She loves plays. She never made a single noise. In fact, she was the quitest one in the whole place. She was perfect.

This whole thing got me thinking about a lot of things. One of which is how people just assume that because a kid is young they are going to be disruptive and annoying. Kids, of any age, are human beings, just like the rest of us, and their age has nothing to do with whether or not they are disruptive. It is said that children only have an attention span the same number of minutes as their age, so Mallory should only have a 2 minute attention span, yet she sat still, intently watching the play, for 180 minutes. Also, the play didn't start till 8:00pm so by the time it was over, it was well past her bedtime, and she was tired, but she was still paying attention and enjoying it.

So here's the lessons I learned from it.

1. In life, don't look at kids as some annoying group that must be tolerated until they grow up. They are people with likes and dislikes. Maybe a kid is throwing a fit cause they genuinely don't like what is going on, and if they do like it, they are capable of paying attention and participating. Children are people, so treat them as such.
2. As Christians, there is an important lesson, that is outlined in 1 Timothy 4:12 "Don’t let anyone think less of you because you are young. Be an example to all believers in what you say, in the way you live, in your love, your faith, and your purity." There is an important lesson here, regardless of which side of the "age line" you are on. If you are a younger Christian, be an example. Age is not an excuse to slack off, falter or fail, just because a lot of people think you will. You have a responsibility to be an example, not only to younger Christians, but also to older Christians. Your calling to follow and obey God in EVERYTHING is not dependant on your age. If you are an "older" Christian don't be like the lady at the play. It may be easy to dismiss younger Christians as immature or inexperienced, and this can have a variety of results, from "think[ing] less of" them to patronizing them, disregarding what they have to say/teach, not learning from their examples. However, the Bible is clear that younger Christians should, and therefore CAN be examples for ALL believers, so allow them to be.

In the end I was very impressed with and proud of Mallory, she was fantastic, and there were so many people that came up after the play to tell her how amazed they were at how well she did. It was a good feeling. However, I would love if people weren't amazed and shocked when kids did well in situations. I would love if people recognized that children can do things more than they are given credit for, and on the other side of things, we are often amazed/inspired/impressed when young people do big things, are examples of what a true Christian should be. I would love to get to the point where we are not impressed, because young people are consistently being and setting examples and older people are consistently expecting young people to be and set examples.