Daily Guideposts 2016: 7-Day Reading PlanSample

Here’s what I love about Legos: they’re endlessly creative. That’s what Benjamin was discovering. At age four, he was finally old enough to build confidently with them. We sat at the dining room table, which we’ve taken to calling Lego City because it’s crowded with a Lego garbage truck, tow truck, dump truck, and various other handmade buildings and vehicles too strange for names. The sound of his little hand raking through the bin in search of the right piece was the sound of my own childhood. I stopped building to watch him.

“Look, Daddy,” he said, holding up something that looked like a cross between a unicycle and a flatbed truck.

“Awesome,” I said. “What does it carry?”

“These boxes,” said Benjamin, picking up some square pieces. “It’s taking them to the dump.”

I tried to remember what it was like to build like that, discovering how Legos can be combined and recombined endlessly. Like our own minds, I thought, our own personalities assembled from so many experiences that could have produced anything, but they produced us.

And now Benjamin was becoming his own person too. I remembered something J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote, that one aspect of God’s image in us is our ability to create. Here we were, playing Legos, but we were also sharing in God’s ongoing work. We were making good things: a fun afternoon; our easygoing relationship; and in one small but deeply satisfying way, we were learning a little more about our Creator.

Our minds are gifts from You, God. Help us to use them well.

—Jim Hinch

Digging Deeper: 2 Corinthians 5:17, Revelation 21:5