My Christmas experiment is over – well, sort of.

Every year I put something fun in our Christmas stockings. Often times it is some kind of gun that fires foam bullets or flying discs … and for a few minutes early on Christmas morning a war breaks out.

But some years I have put other things in the stockings. There was the year that we all got tattoo sleeves. I wore mine all Christmas Day and felt like I was a biker or something.

But probably the best was the year I got us all hand grenades. I thought they were a great idea, but my wife, Lily, didn’t like them at all.

She didn’t like them even before we tossed one. But after we did, she tried desperately to negotiate a cease fire, even going as far as threatening sanctions (to stop cooking).

But there was no stopping us. By mid-morning there was shrapnel (exploded baking powder and water residue) on the hardwood in the living room, on the walls, and into the kitchen.

That may have been my best year.

This year was tougher, perhaps because I started looking late and all the good stuff was gone … or maybe it was the Liberal government’s fault.

With making our armed forces more of a peace-keeping military than a fighting one, maybe the whole nation is going passive.

Anyway, what I came up with this year was eggs. That’s right, everybody got eggs this year – not Easter eggs but dinosaur eggs.

These were eggs you had to put in water in order for them to hatch. They contained dehydrated animals that expand in the water until they break through their shell and “hatch”.

The only problem was that this was a very slow process. No wonder some scientists think that the dinosaurs lived millions and millions of years ago. It took that long for one of these things to hatch!

In other years we opened the gift and started firing. Not this year! We sunk those things in water and watched and watched, and pretty soon ignored them.

It was supposed to take 24 – 48 hours for them to work, but our guys were pretty shy and it took a week for them to fully come out of their shells.

It wasn’t the gift that keeps on giving; it was more like the gift that keeps you looking.

Well, they’re out of their shells and have reached their full size … I’m not sure what the scientists would say about that.

Our kids have both gone back to their homes so we took pictures for them to see what happened.

But now Lily is ready to throw them out. These guys have just spent one day out in the wild and Lil’s ready to chuck them.

I prefer to let them shrink back to their original size, and then maybe watch them grow again.

… Lil’s giving me opposition, but hopefully I can save them from extinction for a week or two.

Here’s the thing: We like things that are ready to go; we want things to be instant. When it comes to our relationship with Christ, it’s the same. But growth takes time and we have to keep at it and be patient. Take time to grow closer to Christ this year. One suggestion is to read through the Bible this year. Yes, it will take a year and about twenty minutes every day, but you will grow and that takes time. In the end, it’s worth it.

That’s Life,

Paul

Question: How are you going to grow this year? Leave your comments below.