Mind Sharpener

Luke 21:34 -- "Be on your guard, so that your minds are not dulled."

When sitting down to sketch, I pull out my old pencil box with my assorted charcoals, gummy erasers, H and B leads, and make sure every point is sharp and ready.  I don't like to interrupt an inspired work to frequent the pencil sharpener so I have more than one of each lead type ready.  The detail just doesn't pop without the proper tools...and the tools have to be maintained.

We are a lot like those leads in my pencil box.

In a little apartment complex just across the Ohio River in Indiana, my sister and I played with a few friends we'd made during a furlough from the mission field.  I was in the third grade, my sister was in the second. This was our first furlough, so, we hadn't really been in a public school system before.  It was kind of a rough year for both of us....but we DID manage to rack up some pretty good memories with a few buddies that we're likely never to forget.

image: Kelly Babb Dalton/sketch by Kelly Babb Dalton

It had been raining for most of the day, so we jumped at the chance to be outside, looking for crawdads in the creek behind our apartment, riding bikes up and down the sidewalk, or even better.....we stomped down a great deal of cattail reeds to make a "fort" nestled in the thick greenery.  It was cool.  If you didn't know where to look, you wouldn't have found the thing hidden so well in the middle of all those tall stems with the fuzzy looking hot dog things on top.

A favorite was to take the wonderful little piece of modern technology called "a battery operated tape recorder" [the thing was larger than our Webster Dictionary] and trudge into the fort to "make movies". We would set the recorder down in the soft, damp reeds and each come up with lines from a cartoon superhero.  Yeah, I know...Stan Lee and Steven Spielberg look out, right?  It was fun, even if it didn't make any sense.

The best part, was playing it back once we got home.  Karla and I were tickled pink and excited to show Mom and Dad our handiwork.  One look at my Dad's face, however, told me that not only were we not winning any "film" awards at Cannes, but that something didn't set well with our father.

image: Kelly Babb Dalton/sketch by Kelly Babb Dalton

Dad took a moment once the recorder was turned off and then said, "I don't want you girls to hang out at the fort anymore.  The language and tone of your friends are not appropriate."  Dad took the tape out of the recorder and wouldn't let us have it back.  I was kind of dumbfounded.  I didn't know what he was talking about.  I had listened to the playback several times before we shared it, I hadn't heard anything in it that I thought sounded inappropriate.

But it WAS there. At the ripe ole' age of twelve or so, and back in the US for less than a year, I had already heard enough foul language that I wasn't able to pick it out of a conversation on that tape.  My mind had become dull to the sensitivity of hearing those harsh words.

I'll never forget that day.  At the time, I didn't really understand the importance of what had happened, but later I could look back at the moment and realize that it can be such a simple thing to slide into a spiritual frame of mind where we tend to overlook too many things.  Too many harsh words, too many ads on television that show too much skin, too many jokes we hear that don't have a very nice punch line...just TOO MUCH! I WANT it to bother me that sometimes Tyler's friends use fowl language.  I WANT to feel uncomfortable when an underwear commercial comes on when I'm watching TV with the boys.  It SHOULD!  I belong to Christ. 

So I added this verse to my prayer box.  I strive to bind it to my heart. I need that little sharpener for my mind.