Becky was a little girl who lived on a small farm with her family many years ago. She had what we might think was a strange doll. It was the shape of a gingerbread girl, but it was made out of cloth. Becky had wanted a doll for a long time, but her family lived far from the nearest town where a doll could be bought. After she asked for a doll many times, her mother decided to make this doll for her out of cloth, filled with corn.
Even though it wasn’t a very pretty doll, Becky loved it. She named it Betsy. She played house with Betsy and took her out for walks, just like other little girls do with their dolls.
One day, Becky and her brother Jimmy had a quarrel. Jimmy had been carving a boat out of a block of wood. He was carefully working on it when Becky accidently bumped into him. The boat was knocked out of his hand and broke when it hit the floor.
Jimmy was so disappointed! “Can’t you ever watch where you’re going?” he cried angrily. “Look what you did!”
“I don’t care if I did it!” snapped Becky. Then she thought to herself, I shouldn’t have said that, because I really do care. She was so ashamed of herself that she hurried out of the room.
I’ll get back at her for that, thought Jimmy, as he picked up the broken pieces of his boat. Just then he saw her doll lying nearby. He grabbed it and ran outside. He found a shovel in the tool shed, and then he raced around to the garden. At the far end of the garden, Jimmy dug a hole and put Becky’s doll in it. Then he covered it up with the dirt.
There, that takes care of that! That’ll pay her back for breaking my boat, he thought to himself. Nobody will ever know what happened to it.
It wasn’t long before Becky missed her doll. She cried and cried, but no one could find Betsy. No one knew what had happened to the doll. That is, no one but Jimmy. And he wasn’t telling.
But Jimmy wasn’t very happy after that. He lied when his mother asked him if he knew where the doll was. He began to feel that he had done something very wrong. He thought about digging up the doll, but when he thought about the hard time he would have trying to explain how it got so dirty, he decided to leave it where it was.
A while later, a few days after a hard rain, Mother was in the garden picking tomatoes. Walking around the garden, she happened to notice a clump of new green plants at the far end. That’s strange, she thought. I wonder what that is. Nothing is planted down there. She walked over to have a closer look, and there, exactly in the shape of Becky’s cloth doll, were tiny, green corn shoots. The corn kernels which were in Becky’s buried doll had started to grow. Jimmy’s hidden sin was discovered.
Mother soon found out the whole story. She told Becky she was wrong for not telling Jimmy she was sorry about his broken boat. And Jimmy had to be punished for taking something that didn’t belong to him and for telling a lie about it.
Children, did you know that the Lord sees everything we do, whether it’s good or bad? “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good” (Proverbs 15:33The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. (Proverbs 15:3)).
Evil (bad) things, called sins, have to be punished. After the first sin, long ago in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve tried to hide themselves from God, because they knew they had done wrong. Eventually, Adam and Eve found out that God still loved them, even though their sin had to be punished. He even made them some clothes to cover them up, since they now knew they were naked. Did you know that we all have sinned? But God, in His great love, made a way to take away our sins, by the death of His own Son, Jesus. John 3:1616For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16) tells us the whole beautiful story in one verse. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that [whoever believes] in Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.” I hope you know and believe God’s wonderful love!
The verse in Proverbs also says the Lord sees the good. One day the Lord will reward all the good things we do, if we know Him as our Savior. And right now, we can do them to please the One who did so much for us.
Messages of God’s Love 6/4/2023