Too big for us

Before school, I had some things to do, so I told the girls to wait for me for a minute in the school room. They love to read, and so they often dig through our big book bin and find a book to look at. This time, as you can see, they took out all of the books and there were books everywhere. When I saw that they had done that, I asked them to hurry and pick them up so that we could start school in a clean room.

When I came back a few minutes later, they had picked up a few, but there had not been much progress, and a couple of the girls were lying despondently on the floor. I asked them why they had not picked up the books as I had asked. One daughter replied, “It’s just too big a job for us to do ourselves.”

At first, the sterner side of me was upset, and I wanted to get after them and tell them that if they were big enough to make that big of a mess themselves, they were certainly big enough to clean up a mess that big themselves. But something stopped me from saying that.

Something brought to my remembrance all of the times in my life when I had made a “big mess” that I just couldn’t fix myself. Something helped me to remember that we have a Savior, who loves us enough to help us clean up those big messes and make them right. He would never abandon us to fix it on our own. Though of course my daughters need to learn to clean up after themselves, I felt joy in sharing that principle with them in a simple way as we cleaned the mess together. In their own little hearts, a burden lifted as we cleaned the books together, and it reminded me of my own joy as I have felt the Savior’s help in my own life, time and time again.

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