Say,,,, WHAT?!

Recently, I've had a meeting of the minds with my fourth-grader. He LOVES to talk.... and talk... and talk... well, you get the idea. He gets that gift of gab easily, with a gregarious preacher for a daddy and a very talkative former disc jockey for a mother. However, he does NOT like to write reports. He would walk up to me and chat about a subject that we're researching, yet say to me, "Do I have to write more than seven sentences?"

The answer was a resounding "YES", when I gave him a "C" for a paper on Thomas Alva Edison. We have had our ears chatted off about Thomas Alva Edison, yet, when it came to writing a paper about this wonderful inventor, he hardly wrote a thing! My son does not suffer "C's" very well. So I sat down with him, and rewrote a paper, explaining to him and showing him how easy it was to just sit down and start telling me in written word what he was sharing with me orally. A week later, he had to write another paper, this time about David Livingstone. To my utter delight, he dove into writing this paper; he actually got up to 701 words -- over a page long! When given the proper encouragement, it's amazing what a person can do.

Recently, while praying to the Lord, I got an umption: "I want you to orate 52 stories in 52 weeks, and put it on the church website. I want you to also draw a picture to correlate with the stories so that children can color them in."

At first, I was scared, and overwhelmed. HOW would I do 52 stories? Then I felt that I really needed to number a notebook paper up to 52. Then, I felt I needed to write down "titles" to stories that I knew. That notebook filled up quicker than I thought with ideas for 52 stories. Then I worried: "I'm okay as an artist, but not stellar... how am I even going to begin drawing these pictures to color?" Then my husband pointed out that I've drawn some other pictures previously that I could use for the web-site stories. He also gave me an idea for a new drawing. I've been given wonderful encouragement from other friends regarding this new endeavor; now, what I need to do is dig in like my son did with his paper. With the proper encouragement, it's amazing what a person is capable of doing.