Lessons from Disney

Yes, I said lessons from Disney. Disney isn't just pure entertainment, you know. There's tons to learn from Disney, and especially on a trip to Walt Disney World.

(At least, that's what we told Little Girl's teacher when we pulled her out of school for a week last January because we don't do Disney in the summer.)

Well, I don't do Disney in the summer. But my brother and sister-in-law? They did.

They've been down there for a week now with Baby Boy. Nobody wanted to miss his first Disney trip, and yet nobody wanted to go to Disney in June either. So they went alone, but at the last minute, I just couldn't resist, and decided to fly on down and spend a couple days with him after all.

I called my brother one day last week to see how the trip was going so far. "Well, he loves everything, but it's so hard to get him to do things," he responded. "We can't even get him out of the hotel room without a fight because he just wants to watch tv. Then, when we get to the park, everything we ride, he doesn't want to leave. He just wants to ride it again. It's like he doesn't get it that there's other fun stuff to do."

However, by the time I got there, he was no longer having that problem. Not realizing this, I said, "Uh-oh," when he turned on the tv first thing in the morning after waking up.

"Oh, it's not a problem, he'll turn it off when it's time to go," said my brother.

"I thought you said..." I began.

"He's figured it out now," my brother answered. "He's finally realized that if he just goes where we want him to go without a fight, we always take him to something fun, so now he just does whatever we tell him."

What an analogy can be drawn from that! It seems so silly for him to scream and cry because he wants to watch Dumbo on tv when what awaits him if he'll leave the tv set is so much more wonderful than television. Yet, he clung and cried to keep what he had rather than trust his parents that the unknown ahead held better things.

How like us is that? Me anyway. I've always had issues with clinging to whatever is known... from a very early age. I remember Graduation Sunday in Sunday School as a child, how I dreaded it for weeks and would cry and cry when the day came. When I was 5, I actually didn't go when they came to take all the kids going into first grade out of our class. One of the other girls told on me and the teacher came back after me, and I just sobbed. I didn't want to go to a new class with a new teacher that I didn't know, I wanted to stay in the class with the teacher that I already knew and enjoyed. This happened year after year, in school too.

The funny thing was, each class and each teacher I loved more than the one before it. Each year was filled with new and exciting adventures that I'd have missed out on if I hadn't been dragged kicking and screaming into the new class. And yet year after year, I continued to cry to leave and go on to the next class, thinking it couldn't possibly be better than the class I was in.

That's just one example. I handle transitions much much better now, but watching Baby Boy is a reminder as I move into each new phase in life and have to give up things from the former phase in order to embrace the new things that it really is a smart thing to just listen to my Father, to go where He tells me to go and do what He tells me to do without putting up a fight, because what He has planned for me is better than what I'm clinging to right now.

Baby Boy caught on pretty quickly. Hopefully I can do the same. :)

(And hopefully his parents have caught on that Disney in June? It's HOT, y'all. HOT.)