Stretched Thin

Angelo kicked at a stone on the pavement. "Did I tell you that I can't go live with my dad?" he asked his friend Tai. "I have to stay with Mom." Angelo sighed. "Dad always took time to do stuff with me. Y'know--guy stuff. Now I'll only get to be with him every other weekend.""Well, you can still call and text him, can't you?" asked Tai. "You still have a lot to be thankful for."As Tai spoke, Angelo noticed that his eyes were bright. Are those tears in Tai's eyes? he wondered. As he thought about it, he realized he'd never heard Tai talk about his father. "Does your dad live with you?"Tai shook his head. "My dad died," he said softly."Oh! I'm sorry," said Angelo, not sure what else to say.The boys walked quietly for a while. "It's been tough, and I miss Dad a lot," Tai said finally. "But one day, Mom helped me understand how she deals with it. I had this toy guitar I made by stretching rubber bands around a long box. When I strummed them they made different sounds, depending on how tight they were." He paused, and Angelo looked at him curiously. "Some of the rubber bands fit over my box easily," Tai continued, "but others were tight and had to be stretched out thin in order to get around the cardboard. A few even snapped." "What does that have to do with missing your dad and getting along without him?" Angelo asked."Mom pointed out that when I strummed my make-believe guitar, the rubber bands that fit super-tight made different musical sounds than the ones that were looser. She said life is like that too, and when bad things happen, we're stretched like those small rubber bands. We may be hurting, but we can still make music during the hard times of our lives because Jesus is with us. He understands what we're going through because He suffered too. We don't have to give up and snap." Tai looked at his friend. "Mom and I decided to trust Jesus to be with us through the hard parts of our lives. I'll pray that you'll be able to do that too." – Nance E. Keyes