Moms, I hope you and your family were able to be part of our Easter services, and I hope you were blessed by them. Coming and being involved is what helps us grow in our faith, but sometimes kids don’t get that, and they just want to sleep. Hopefully if that describes what you faced that morning you weren’t tempted to do what one Phoenix mom did.
Last Easter, Sharon Dobbins was determined to get her two teenage sons out of bed for Easter services, but they just wanted to sleep in. When one of them sassed her, she grabbed a stun gun and said, “Get up! It’s Jesus’ Day!” She “sparked” the weapon, she says, just to make the noise, but her son (16) called the police, who found two small bumps on the boy’s leg and arrested mom for child abuse.
Dobbins told the local TV station, “I did not tase my son; … all I was trying to do is tell my kids to put God first.” The love of God spreads faster when riding on 50,000 volts of electricity!
Now in fairness to mom, a stun gun is far different from a Taser, which incapacitates. And if they’re honest, her sons would probably admit they’ve “sparked” each other a few times out of pure curiosity. It’s part of being a male—especially a teenage one. It doesn’t do any real damage; it’s just designed to stun someone long enough to help you get away from an attacker.
That being said, stunning your kids isn’t the best way to get them to “put God first” and go to church. If being involved in worship and church activities isn’t something you’ve set the example in and had the family doing consistently already, trying to motivate them to get up for Easter (or any other Sunday) will prove difficult.
It’s funny how we’d almost never let our kids miss a baseball practice or play rehearsal at school, but we’re fine with waiting to fit God in when our busy schedule has a few minutes left over.
I’m grateful that I have a mom who set such a good example of faithfulness—24/7/365. We learned early on that other activities are fine, but God always comes first. I remember begging my parents to let me stay home from church some Sunday nights to watch the Wonderful World of Disney, or on the Sunday morning of the Wimbledon Gentlemen’s Final. The answer was always no. And it wasn’t because God set in Scripture what times we had to worship. It was to instill the principle that God comes first—in ALL things. Because when we stand before Him it’s not going to matter how many starring roles we had or what our batting average was. All that’s going to matter is if we followed Christ with everything we have.
It’s a good thing stun guns and tasers weren’t around in the ‘70s, because with all my youthful misdeeds, my mom probably would’ve been tempted to employ one on me—enthusiastically and often. Even with the best of examples some of us take a little longer to come around than others!