Ice Cream Peeps

We’re on vacation this week, so I thought I’d tweak some older pieces I wrote before I was blogging.

From 2002. . .

Last Saturday night I spoke to a group of high school kids about our longing for new experiences, which is one of the five basic needs of adolescents.  (The others are the need for love, the need for recognition, the need for security, and freedom from guilt. The older I get, the more I realize we are all adolescents in this regard!)  At the end of the talk I sang a song I wrote for my son, "Steady As You Go."

Every time I sing that song it is a reminder and challenge to ask myself if I am being the kind of dad that lives out Truth. I reflected on that some this past weekend, and Sunday night after dinner, Steady and I were sitting at the kitchen counter.  He was eating a bowl of ice cream. I didn't get a bowl; I got a spoonful...but then I pouted enough that a bowl appeared in front of my eyes a couple of minutes later. I figured pouting works for kids sometimes, so I tried it. It works!

So there we are, a three year-old kid and a thirty-seven year-old kid, sharing a bowl of ice cream.  And I began to reflect on the memories of my Dad and me sharing these kinds of everyday experiences together.  I said to Steady, "Son, you are like the twelfth generation descendant of William Cash of Scotland.  He came over on a boat in the 1653.  Son, I’ve heard Billy was an ice cream person.  I am an ice cream person. My Dad—your Granddaddy—is an ice cream person.  Steady, we are ice cream people.  Your peeps are ice cream peeps." 

He did not understand a bit of this except, "ice cream.” For that matter, neither did Emma or the girls.

What I was trying to communicate to him is that Cash men love ice cream.  There are times when I wish that wasn't so, but it is.  It is a well-known fact that one of our Cash ancestors was told by an angel that dessert at every meal in heaven will be Breyer's Natural Vanilla ice cream with my Mom’s hot fudge recipe on top.

So, after all this, I am left with a question: Where does being a dad who lives out Truth fit in with the importance of the Cash people being ice cream peeps?  Here's how...because God, in spite of the fact that we are frail and broken people who fail on a daily basis, has chosen us to hold and hand off the baton of Life. We stumble sometimes. We fall. But we keep running with Truth in our hands and our hearts.

Rich Mullins captures part of what I’m saying in “We Are Not as Strong as We Think We Are”:

We are frail

We are fearfully and wonderfully made

Forged in the fires of human passion

Choking on the fumes of selfish rage

And with these our hells and our heavens

So few inches apart

We must be awfully small

And not as strong as we think we are

There are times when I wish I was different...that I wouldn't struggle with so many things...that I wouldn't put on a mask every day.  On a bad day, it can send me into a downward spiral of self-defeat.  On a good day, I hear a whisper in my ear, "Hey, you of Cash ice cream peep lineage, MY grace...is sufficient...for you (1 Corinthians 12:9). 

God loves us just like we are... but also loves us too much to let us stay that way. (Not sure exactly who said that first, but it certainly isn’t me.)