A Logical Question

A Logical Question

The wisdom of this world is foolishness to God.

1 Corinthians 3:19

My niece Kim was three years old. Her sisters, Rhonda and Julie, were five and seven. They lived with their parents, Loren and Penny, and Loren’s parents, who everyone called Mom and Dad, on a Kansas wheat farm where they also raised cattle.

One morning Dad noticed that one of the cows was about ready to birth her calf, and from past experience he thought she might need help. He closed her in a stall in the barn. Sure enough, she was soon in hard labor, so Dad and Loren changed clothes and started out the door to the barn.

“Can we go, Daddy?” asked Rhonda.

Looking at Penny, he said, “What do you think?”

“They have to learn sometime,” she said. “It might as well be now, I guess.”

“Okay, let’s go, then,” said Loren, “but you have to stay out of the way so the old cow doesn’t kick you.”

The birthing process was a long, arduous ordeal. After forty-five minutes of huffing, puffing, and using pulling chains, they finally smiled as the little white-faced, spindly legged calf was born. Dad and Loren, not to mention the cow, were exhausted.

The two men leaned against the barn wall to catch their breath, wipe the sweat off their faces, and admire the wobbly calf. It was at that precise moment that little Kim, peering between the rails of the stall, posed a three-year-old’s logical question.

“Well, Daddy,” she said seriously, “just how’d that thing get in there anyway?”

Now, if you think Loren was out of breath before, that innocent question really caused him to suck air. But it was, after all, a logical question from a three-year-old’s viewpoint, don’t you think?

I am so grateful that God doesn’t turn a deaf ear to our childlike questions. How wonderful that we always have his ear!

Father, I pray that you will give me wisdom for living. Help me to follow your guidelines for happiness and to glorify you by the way I live. Amen.