Leaf Rubbings

I love fall.  One of the crafts I do every year with my sons is leaf rubbing.  There's something just magical about using crayons and construction paper and revealing the beauty lying just underneath the surface, but this year, something else occurred to me as I watched my eldest struggle to the leaf rubbings all on his own this year.  In previous years, he's been content to let me demonstrate how to hold the crayon to reveal the leaf underneath, but this year, he wanted to figure it out on his own and had a horrible time getting the leaf to show up.  There's a trick involved to get the leaf to reveal itself.  You have to know how to use your senses and use the right amount of pressure to reveal the design underneath or your scribblings can obscure the leaf and make it hard for it to reveal itself.  What a perfect picture of free will and how it interacts with God's predetermined design.  We decide the color of our crayon and how we color, God's plan is always there underneath the surface.  Maybe we change how much of God's design can be seen in our lives by not learning (or applying) the trick of coloring in our lives that lets his design shine through, but that doesn't change his perfect design that is underneath.

My eldest doesn't quite "have" the trick, yet, but he's working on it.  The baby is still content to let me help him and guide his hand so his picture is a lot clearer this year than his brother.  Maybe that's what it means to have faith like a little child.  A small child still lets others guide his/her hand and has perfect trust; it's only when we get older, when we insist that everything must be done on our own and our way, that our picture gets really messy.