God Bless Samantha

Posted on Apr 29, 2008 in Samantha Stuff | 0 comments

In the last couple of months, we’ve found that Samantha’s emotions aren’t that of a really young kid. Oh, she just passed her third birthday, so we do get “three year old”-itis, but in general, she seems much more mature than her age is.

She certainly doesn’t like it when Mommy or Daddy have any sort of raised voice. If that happens, or one of us sounds sad for any reason, she’ll usually go “What’s wrong, Mommy?” or “Are you OK, Daddy?” One of her other favorites is to say “Can you make a happy face?” When you’re not in a good mood, that one is hard to deal with, because you want to make her happy, and you know that she realizes you’re not happy. She’s quite observant of our feelings and moods.

One thing she has done since she was rather young was that whenever she heard some sort of siren, or saw emergency vehicle flashing lights when in the truck, she’d say “God Bless Them”. She’s grown a lot in her usage of religious things, and it’s quite glorious to me as her father. For ages, we’ve been saying the Lord’s Prayer when she goes to bed. Well, in Church after she comes in for a blessing during communion she stays afterwards. When Communion is done, everyone says the Lord’s Prayer, and the light bulb went on for her, and she has started saying it with everyone else. Being three, she says it in that loud monotone kid voice, but darnit, it’s cute! What else is cute about that is she’s started blessing herself at the end of it. We’ve noticed that she has started closing her eyes when we say prayers for her (or our clergy at church doing it for her during blessings). All this has come from her. She also chastised me a week or so ago at dinnertime.. “Daddy, you didn’t bless the food!”, so we had to go back and say Grace.

The best thing for me that I observed recently was this past Saturday. There’s a playground about two miles from our house – it’s quite nice, actually, very new and clean. Anyway, Samantha and I went there while Mommy was at work, and at one point we had both climbed up one of the playground things (I can’t think of a good word for them) and were sitting there playing a new game we had invented. We had been there for awhile, and I was so overwhelmed with joy that I just burst into praising God for the blessing of the day, my daughter, the love in our life, etc… Anyway, when I was done, Samantha followed me in praising by saying “Thank you God for all of my gifts”. It almost made me cry.

Speaking of crying, Lynn told me a doozie when she and Samantha came home from church Sunday (I did not attend, as I was lying on my back in a lot of pain from having fallen in the house earlier this week). Lynn told me that Samantha got upset because she “couldn’t hug God”. Lynn got around that by saying that by hugging other people, you show God’s love, and are therefore hugging God (or something like that, I’m unclear on her exact words). Samantha then said “God is in my heart”, and I did cry. Maybe not bawling tears down the face crying, but wow – I was bowled over by that.

You know when we were pregnant, Samantha got us to go back to church – neither Lynn nor I were attending at that point. We hooked up with a church family that has meant so much to us, I can’t even begin to describe it. The entire church has been seriously supportive to us, and that’s important, what with all our “real family” back home in Pennsylvania. God led us to this church family, and has richly blessed us with the people in it. It’s for that reason that something one of the clergy said to me recently has touched my heart. I was told “God is raising a strong Christian household in your house”. To hear that from people whose opinions and thoughts mean a lot to me in my spiritual walk was quite humbling – Praise be to God for all those at our church in whatever capacity they are there.

Anyway, I never stop being amazed at the spiritual growth in all three of us. But this article is about Samantha, so I’ll close up by saying that seeing Samantha do all these things at Church fills me with a deeper love for her than I had merely as her Earthly father.

God Bless Samantha!

Mommy is the one with the better memory, so I’m hoping to get a blog entry from her regarding other things I can’t recall.