My oldest grandson is into legos.  I mean big time legos.  He loves to play legos.  He wants others to play legos with him.  Unfortunately at the age of 8 he has a limited concentration span for putting Lego models together.  The other day I was over at his house visiting with he and his family and he showed me a picture of a lego model race car he wanted to build but had never done it.  I love putting legos together and said that when he came back from his trip to Virginia, I would come over and help him build it.  I am a person who like to be true to what I say and so yesterday was the day we were going to build this car from scratch.

One of the first big challenges we had to face involved the mixing up of the car parts that had been separated previously with all of his other Lego parts–1000’s upon 1000’s upon thousands of parts mixed up with all the other legos in one big plastic container.  This was going to be a long process I began to realize.

The first step was to separate the legos into different containers based upon their color.  The car was red, so we began to pick out all the red parts to build the car. There were red legos, blue legos, gray legos, pink legos, yellow legos, orange legos, green and brown legos, black legos, etc. legos.

There were big pieces as well as tiny pieces.  My wife Nadine as well as Victoria, my daughter, and Parker, her fiancée, realized I was in trouble with this enormous project and pitched in to begin to help in the process.  Slowly we separated all the pieces into bins and began the process of building the race car.  It took over 3 hours from start to finish to separate the parts into color bins and take the needed parts to build the car.

The finished product rested on the carpet where we all created the production line to bring piece by piece together to form the anticipated race car.  There were some valuable lessons learned in the process.

1.  A community is essential in nurturing the needs children growing up today.
2. Patience is key when tackling a difficult project.  Brayden was called upon to find pieces in the bins and it took some patience in fingering through the bins to find the right piece.
3. Developing endurance is an important quality to have as we grow into adulthood.  Brayden was ready to give up in the first hour, but was encouraged to continue to work on the project and see it through to its ultimate conclusion–the finished car.
4. Putting all the legos in one box only multiplies the time necessary to complete a project.  Organization is a key ingredient to becoming more efficient in accomplishing tasks.
5. Working with an 8-year-old can be a very frustrating as well as a very rewarding experience, depending upon where you put your focus.  If you put your focus on accomplishing the task, it will be very frustrating.  If you put your focus on what you can teach a young boy, it will be very rewarding.  I experienced both yesterday.

On this journey, God will have some tasks for us to work on that don’t seem to be teaching us much of anything.  Opening our eyes and hearts and asking God what He wants us to learn is the key to learning on this journey.