In a Chicken Soup book, Sandy Smith wrote how going to go to college was a big deal because her father passed away a few years earlier, and they were not wealthy when he was still alive. But through her mother’s sacrifices, she and her siblings were not only cared for, she was still able go to college. To make her feel like an adult, her mother even let her drive them when she moved into her dorm room that first fall. As Sandy drove, her mother asked if she had any gum. That request shocked her, however, because Sandy had never seen her mother chew gum. Never. Ever. In all 18 years of her life. And she was then downright stunned when her mother took the pack of gum out of her purse and said “Oh, honey, this is my favorite gum. Even when I was a child, I always loved this gum.” As she watched her mother joyfully chew the gum, Sandy wrote that she just had to ask what the deal was with the gum, saying “how did I not know that you chewed gum?”

When our boys were young, they loved a bible story series titled VeggieTales. In their version of the story of Jonah, they introduced a companion for him that they referred to throughout the story as his “pint-sized traveling buddy.” So whenever I wanted one of the boys to come with me to run an errand or go shopping, I would ask them to come as my “pint-sized traveling buddy.” As we ran errands one day in that time period, I had to go from Jonestown to Lebanon. As we sat at a light in Lebanon, I heard a pint-sized voice pipe up from the backseat of the car to ask a question: “It was Jesus that died on the cross, right, and not the Father and Holy Spirit?” “Yes,” I replied, wondering where this question was going. “Why then,” he went on, “does that church on the corner named Trinity have the image of three crosses on its wall?”