A Word of Encouragement with Elizabeth Rice Handford
The part I loved best about being principal of a Christian school was the sweet conversations I had with the children. (The part I liked least was disciplining other people’s children!) I struck up a conversation with a
little first-grader one day. “What do you like best about school?” I asked.
“I’m in the stupid reading group,” she said promptly. “They call us Robins, but we’re really the dumb kids.” (But the staff chose bird names for reading circles on purpose, so students wouldn’t guess they were grouped by ability!)
I said, “I felt that way about arithmetic. I could read but I couldn’t add numbers. We all have something hard to learn. You just keep working at it, dear child. You will learn to read, and you’ll use it all your life.”
“Maybe,” she said warily, as if she weren’t sure she wanted to give up the dumb kid label. It might be easier to stay dumb.
The truth is, if you’ve trusted Jesus as your Savior, then you are a child of God. The Bible says so. No other label is as important as that, because it promises you that God, your dear Father, will help you do what you ought to do. Galatians 4:4-7 (nlt) says:
But when the right time came,
God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law.
God sent Jesus to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law,
so that He could adopt us as His very own children.
And because you have become His children,
God has sent the Spirit of His Son into your hearts,
and now you can call God your dear Father.
Now you are no longer a slave but God’s own child.
And since you are His child, everything He has belongs to you.
I invited a woman to come to church with me. “I can’t,” she said, “I’m divorced. If I go to church, all people see is a big black label on my forehead, DIVORCED.”
“Not true!” I exclaimed. “Have you trusted Jesus as your Savior?”
“Oh, yes.”
“That’s the only label we see: ‘I am a child of God.’”
(But even as I wrote that sentence, I had to admit to myself, “Libby, you spend too much time thinking about how old and tired you’ve gotten, instead of being grateful God is your Father.”
A dear friend and I were talking the other day. He has for years worked as a counselor with NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) to help people get over the stigma of mental illness. He referred several times to the fact that when he had open heart surgery, he lost 30% of his cognitive skills. It was a heavy loss, true, but I finally said to him, “Friend, maybe you ought to quit thinking so much about the skills you’ve lost. You’re doing just fine at your job with the skills you have. Why handicap yourself with a label?”
He laughed. “That’s ironic. I say that all the time to my NAMI friends. Why couldn’t I see it in myself?”
Why? Because it’s almost too good to be true. But it is true. When you trust Jesus as your Savior, He makes you His child, and your wise and loving Heavenly Father will help you to do whatever it is you need to do. What other label could we ever want or need?