The lesson stayed with me all that day until I picked Katie up from school for her swimming lesson that afternoon. On the way to the lesson, we talked about her day and she started talking about the Valentine celebration they had had in class. In particular, she talked about the Airhead (type of candy) that she got from one of her classmates and how another classmate received a bigger one than she did. With my earlier lesson in envy in my head, I decided to use this as a small teaching moment and an opportunity to share the lesson that I had learned in bible study that day in a 5 year old friendly way. I explained to her that she got the Airhead that God wanted her to have and that if God had wanted her to have a bigger one, she would have received a bigger one.
She thought about this for a moment and then agreed, "Yeah, because God is our remote." Confusion reigned for a moment in my head as I tried to figure out what she might be talking about. Remote? Like, far away? No, that didn't make any sense...Could she mean a different word? Sometimes she uses one word when she means another because she doesn't have a big enough vocabulary to encompass everything she wants to say yet...No, I don't think so. What else could she be talking about...Wait, remote, like, remote control? "Do you mean, remote, like, the remote control for the TV?" "No," she replied. "Like the Wii remote." What?!? "Why do you say that?" "Because God is giving us things and making us do things like the we do with the Wii people."
Oh my. I truly wanted to bust out laughing at this point. It amazed me that she had made this connection about God and that she was so particular about what kind of remote. I think of the Wii remote and the TV remote as essentially the same. They both control electronics. In her mind, however, they are very different. One has many buttons and changes channels or gives lists that one has to read and click on. The other controls what looks like a person. As she moves the remote, so moves the person on the screen, like a puppet master and his marionette. It made complete sense to me how she made that connection to God. To many, he seems like a puppet master who just pulls our strings (or yanks our chains, depending on your opinion of God).
I managed to get past my laughter and have a short conversation about the difference between how the Wii remote controls the people on the screen (who have no ability to think for themselves) and God's desire to let us have free will. What amazed me even more is that we had this whole conversation in less than the 15 minutes it takes to get from her school to the pool.
You heard it here first. God is a Wiimote. :)
