A little boy was spending his Saturday morning playing in his sandbox. He had with him his box of cars and trucks, his plastic pail, and a shiny, red plastic shovel. In the process of creating roads and tunnels in the soft sand, he discovered a large rock in the middle of the sandbox.

The lad dug around the rock, managing to dislodge it from the dirt. With no little bit of struggle, he pushed and nudged the rock across the sandbox by using his feet. (He was a very small boy and the rock was very huge.) When the boy got the rock to the edge of the sandbox, however, he found that he couldn’t roll it up and over the little wall.

Determined, the little boy shoved, pushed, and pried, but every time he thought he had made some progress, the rock tipped and then fell back into the sandbox. The little boy grunted, struggled, pushed, shoved — but his only reward was to have the rock roll back, smashing his chubby fingers. Finally he burst into tears of frustration.

All this time the boy’s father watched from his living room window as the drama unfolded. At the moment the tears fell, a large shadow fell across the boy and the sandbox. It was the boy’s father.

Gently but firmly he said, “Son, why didn’t you use all the strength that you had available?”

Defeated, the boy sobbed back, “But I did, Daddy, I did! I used all the strength that I had!”

“No, son,” corrected the father kindly. “You didn’t use all the strength you had. You didn’t ask me.”

With that the father reached down, picked up the rock, and removed it from the sandbox.

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Do you have “rocks” in your life that need to be removed? Are you discovering that you don’t have what it takes to lift them? There is One who is always available to us and willing to give us the strength we need. When the apostle Paul faced times of a broken spirit and sapped strength, he proclaimed to the Corinthian church, “My grace is enough for you. When you are weak, then my power is made perfect in you” (2 Corinthians 12:9b NCV).

When we are broken in spirit and our strength is spent, we can turn to our Savior Jesus.

Watch this touching video clip given above which shows a conversation between a father and son.

This Greek short film (with English subtitle) was made in 2007.

Father and son are sitting on a bench. Suddenly a sparrow lands across them. The old Father asks son, “What is that?” to which the son replies “A Sparrow” and looks back into his newspaper. After sometime his father again asks him “What is that”. A little annoyed, son replies “I just told you father, its a sparrow”.

Then, the sparrow flies to the other side and sits there. The father repeats his question “what is that?”. This time, son replies “A sparrow father, a sparrow…s-p-a-r-r-o-w……” and when again the father repeats his question, son is filled with anger and says “Why are you doing this Father? How many times I told you its a sparrow!!!”

Father gets up and goes into the house to take his old dairy. He comes back and asks his son to read a passage from the dairy, which goes like this “Today my youngest son, who a few days ago turned three, was sitting with me at the park when a sparrow sat in front of us. My son asked me 21 times what it was and I answered all 21 times that it was a sparrow. I hugged him every single time he asked me the same question again and again without getting mad, feeling affection for my innocent little boy.”

This is really a good video. I couldn’t help crying after watching it. Really meaningful, if only people of today could learn of the patience of this loving father. Its sad to think that often we are so succumbed to impulse like the son in this video.

A simple, yet very meaningful, with the message very clearly put forward. Check this out….

We often learn the most from our children.

Some time ago, a friend of mine punished his 3-year old daughter for wasting a roll of gold wrapping paper.

Money was tight, and he became infuriated when the child tried to decorate a box to put under the tree.

Nevertheless, the little girl brought the gift to her father on Christmas morning and said, “This is for you Daddy.”

He was embarrassed by his earlier overreaction, but his anger flared again when he found that the box was empty.

He yelled at her, “Don’t you know that when you give someone a present there is supposed to be something inside it?”

The little girl looked up at him with tears in her eyes and said, “Oh, Daddy, it’s not empty. I blew kisses into the box, all for you, Daddy.”

The father was crushed, he put his arms around his little girl and he begged for her forgiveness.

My friend told me that he kept that gold box by his bed for years.

Whenever he felt discouraged, he would take out an imaginary kiss and remember the love of the child who had put it there.

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In a very real sense, each of us, as parents, has been given a gold container filled with unconditional love and kisses from our children. There is no more precious possession anyone could hold.