By Debora Coty
Animal photos by my friend, Marian Crawford
Bedecked in my flowered Bible Story Lady hat, I pulled yet another stuffed animal out of my cavernous bag, attempting to teach a room full of three and four-year-olds the rudimentary building blocks of the Bible.
Today’s lesson was “God Made Animals.” How can you botch that, right?
So I was surrounded by piles of plush bunnies, doggies, kitty-cats, anteaters, squirrels, lions-and-tigers-and-bears-oh-my … you name the furry beast and it was probably there. The kids had grown wilder and crazier with the introduction of each critter until chaos reigned and I could no longer be heard above the den of little voices or seen among the flailing limbs rushing me to be the next volunteer to extract one of God’s four-legged creations out of my bag.
I felt like a quarterback being sacked over and over again.
Papa God should be pleased that His handiwork is so popular with the wee set. But at the moment, I was not.
When I’d finally extracted myself from the bedlam, and the boonfoggled teachers had restored some manner of order to the room, I thought to myself, as I made for the door, well, that was an absolute disaster.
But my escape route was blocked by a teensy floppy-haired maverick in cowboy boots. The adorable tyke looked up at me with twinkling blue eyes and said, “Tank you Miss Debbie; that was bewwy, bewwy good!”
Suddenly, magically, my perspective changed and I saw the “failed, disastrous, chaotic” lesson from a preschooler’s perspective. It was fun. It grabbed my attention. It gave full credit to Papa God for a job well done (creating all those awesome animals). And it was bewwy, bewwy, good.
Hey, aren’t those the same words – sort of – that the Almighty used at the end of each chaotic day of creation? By dingies, they are: “God looked at what he had done, and it was good” (Genesis 1:18, CEV). Bewwy, bewwy good, you might even say.
So dear BFF (Blessed Friend Forever), the next time you think you’ve made a miserable mess of things, remember this little story and take heart. What you view as failure may actually be, by someone else’s yardstick, bewwy, bewwy good.
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Debora M. Coty is an inspirational speaker and award-winning author of over 100 articles and 13 books, including Fear, Faith, and a Fistful of Chocolate, More Beauty, Less Beast, and Too Blessed to Be Stressed. Debora also teaches writing workshops. Visit www.DeboraCoty.com
