Gratitude Challenge Day 5: Unwearyingness

If you walk into our kitchen, you just might discover cinnamon poured into the dishwasher as I did this week. Or you might see a mixture of honey and peanut butter smeared all over the floor as my wife also found recently. Don’t be surprised if you see a bowl with some unknown concoction that includes eggs cracked inside and out of it on the counter. And you will probably spot the two-year-old culprit standing on the tiny counter space next to the stove with the vitamin cupboard open, frantically searching for those sugary kid vitamins. As he senses you closing in on him you will undoubtedly hear an emphatic “No, mine!” as he gets ready to defend his position. Today I give thanks for that energetic and determined little boy Peter who melts our hearts, eats our butter (literally), and never lets an obstacle get in the way of what he is set on obtaining.

                As Peter learned to walk and then run, we quickly realized that we were going to have a hard time keeping track of him. If anyone happens to leave the garage door open at our house, he will run out and try to make a break for the school across the street where he knows there is a playground. When we take him there we still have to keep a careful eye on him—we nearly lost him recently as he took off for a back entrance to the school field that leads to an adjacent street and almost made it away undetected. This last weekend I was filling our green waste can with tree limbs with him, but since he kept trying to run away and cross the street I took him inside. He was not very happy about that. I stayed in for a couple of minutes doing something else and then I went back to the front door (which I had top locked) to go back out. Much to my shock, there was Peter on the porch on the other side of the door. Finding the front door impenetrable, he had apparently gone out the back door into the dark of night and around the house, through the fence gate, and had (gratefully) come back to proudly hang out on the front porch. The song Don’t Fence Me In has become for us his theme song!

                One of my favorite descriptions of a prophet in the scriptures is this one of Nephi the son of Helaman: “Blessed art thou, Nephi, for those things which thou hast done; for I have beheld how thou hast with unwearyingness declared the word, which I have given unto thee, unto this people” (Helaman 10:4). You won’t find the word unwearyingness in the dictionary, but for me it is a perfect description of our little boy who when he has his mind set on something will relentlessly seek after it like Nephi sought to preach the word. One of my favorite examples of this is when we kneel down as a family at night to pray. If I ask someone besides Peter to pray I inevitably will hear from him, “No! My turn!” And who can argue with that? He has become my buddy at work and it is not uncommon for my coworkers to see his face in our Zoom meetings. That is not because I don’t shut and lock my door—no, he has figured out how to, with scissors, turn the little groove on the outside of the door to get it unlocked and come bursting in announcing “PieceOfGumMint!” (meaning that I need to give him both as payment to leave, which he won’t do anyway). He actually figured out how to open the “kid proof” gate at the top of our stairs before his older sister. No door or gate can keep him out when he is set on passing through! Recently our family sang in church and our plan was to have him sit back on the bench next to our friend whom he knows well, but despite his great love for her, he was not to be left behind by the family when we went up on the stand. So he got to sit on my lap while I played the song My Own Sacred Grove and the others sang, but I was happy to have my little “helper” (as he calls himself) there as we sang about another unwavering boy who took to a grove a trees to pray. I hope that as Peter continues to grow up he will likewise seek the Lord with his unfailing resolve and indeed find his own sacred grove. How grateful we are that our Father in Heaven chose to send us this determined little boy. I just hope in the coming years that we can keep up with him!