{"id":33213,"date":"2007-12-17T13:25:53","date_gmt":"2007-12-17T13:25:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2007\/12\/17\/of-god-and-drumsticks\/"},"modified":"2007-12-17T13:25:53","modified_gmt":"2007-12-17T13:25:53","slug":"of-god-and-drumsticks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2007\/12\/17\/of-god-and-drumsticks\/","title":{"rendered":"Of God And Drumsticks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes, I hate that all the good local pre-Ks are Church based. I&#8217;m as religious as the next guy, but in a religious school, it&#8217;s way too easy for the teachers to invoke God when they can&#8217;t handle things. It drives me crazy. In fact, I&#8217;ve told both my kids that if anyone ever tells them that &#8220;God wants you to do&#8221; something, they are to respond with &#8220;you don&#8217;t speak for God.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately,&nbsp;both my kids have talented teachers and this hasn&#8217;t been a problem&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>Now, with that as the backdrop, let&#8217;s get to the tale!<\/p>\n<p>The kids had a sleepover the other nught and&nbsp;were up well past any reasonable hour. The next morning, I supervised three sleep deprived children&nbsp;while their moms put themselves together for the new day.<\/p>\n<p>Of course the kds&nbsp;were having problems.<\/p>\n<p>At one point, there was a heated conflict over a drum stick. More specifically, my oldest didn&#8217;t want to give it up.<\/p>\n<p>I had a talk with him, explaining the importance of sharing and being a good friend.<\/p>\n<p>At the end, I asked him what he was going to do &#8211; gave him the opportunity to do the right thing, He just couldn&#8217;t. I could see the conflict in his face: be nice or keep the drum stick?<\/p>\n<p>I tried to prompt him. &#8220;What should you do, big guy? What should you do?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I hadn&#8217;t noticed that his friend had snuck closer. She piped up now. &#8220;You should do what God wants you to,&#8221; she said. &#8220;You should do what God wants you to.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;God?&#8221; My son said. &#8220;It&#8217;s just a drum stick. This isn&#8217;t about God!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He dropped the drum stick on the floor, disgusted, and walked away.<\/p>\n<p>Hallelujah, little guy. Hallelujah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes, I hate that all the good local pre-Ks are Church based. I&#8217;m as religious as the next guy, but in a religious school, it&#8217;s way too easy for the teachers to invoke God when they can&#8217;t handle things. It drives me crazy. In fact, I&#8217;ve told both my kids that if anyone ever tells [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,121,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-the-kids","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8DH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}