Captive Audience

Kid2's ballet company had their year-end recital last night (yes, I'll post photos as soon as the smokin' hot shutterbug trophy wife lets me have a few from her stash). I was excited to be going for a couple of reasons. First, it's always cool to see your daughter do what she loves doing, and it's nice to see how much progress she's made in the last year.

Second, it's pretty cool to see the past & future at these things. You know, you watch the little girls in their cute costumes execute the biggest move they know--holding hands and more or less skipping in unison in a circle--and then you get to see the more advanced begin to look like professionals. You kind of see where your kid has been (and, let's face it, those kids are really cute) and where they want to get to.

Finally, you get to be a proud parent and hang out with other proud parents. All-in-all, it's a very enjoyable time for me. Plus, I get to give my daughter a bouquet of flowers when it's all said and done, and the kiss on the cheek I get in return makes the money/time/sacrifice well worth it.

Anyway, the drawback is the drive to Fort Worth in afternoon traffic. I have to be honest here: There's no good way to get to anything in Dallas or Fort Worth from where I live at certain times of the day. 121 to 35-W...forget it at 5PM. 1171 to 35-W to 30? It took me 35 minutes to get out of Flower Mound (traffic here is getting awful on major roads--especially the one in front of my church). Another hour to the Will Rogers Auditorium. Ugh.

I wasn't looking forward to the drive, man. Kid1 had to hurry home on her daily commute to/from downtown Dallas. Skip dinner. Drive. I'd prepared mentally...but couldn't help but think of about a million other things I needed to be doing with that time (yeah, true to form, the sermon has fallen apart...nothing I can't fix in a couple of hours, but it would've been nice to have that time to do it and get it behind me) and had resigned myself to listening to an hour and a half of sportstalk radio.

Well, I decided to make small talk with Kid1 as the sports chatter was about the NBA and I couldn't care less about that.

Well, she decided to make small talk become large talk.

We talked about our church.
We talked about our walks with Christ.
We talked about what that "looks" like.
We talked about how we both fit into what Christ is doing around us.
We talked about areas we need to get our acts together.

It seemed like I blinked and we were at the auditorium.

And the bonus I got yesterday was how perceptive Kid1 is. Not much gets past our children, folks.
I got to see Kid1's heartbeat on life and living it.
I got to see Kid1 in the stages of making her faith her very own.
I got to see Kid1 looking at life with her unique eyes.
I got to see Kid1 willing to chat about her warts and being okay with some of mine.

And then I got to see Kid2 deliver the goods I was expecting.

Sometimes, the greatest days are found in the mundane.

Especially when the mundane is followed by the spectacular. And yesterday, I got both.

It was grand.