A mother, two boys, and mud: a Miry Story

Once upon a time there was an age-unspecified woman called Maree who was, by no fault of her own, a temporarily single mother. She had two marvellous boys called Joel and James. Joel and James, being boys, loved playing outside and especially loved playing with their friends, Oz and Brit. Now it happened that Maree and the boys and the friends all lived in a particularly long, muddy Wood, and on this particular day there had been much rain and so there were many mud puddles – ideal conditions for three boys and a girl to thoroughly sully their clothing. Unfortunately, the three older children possessed a fair amount of common sense while James, the youngest, did not. So when Joel and Brit encouraged James to jump in a puddle, James happily complied – returning home shortly thereafter with shoes that were an inch higher and brown pants which had previously been beige. To say that Maree was unimpressed would be putting it as mildly as Nando’s Lemon and Herb chicken. Rather, her anger was comparable with their strongest Peri-Peri offerings. James excused his behaviour by saying he had been tempted by the other three; his sibling was briefly questioned and fobbed the blame off on the two friends. Maree found Oz first and chided her; when the hapless Brit came wandering by he came under her stern and unpleasant rebuke too. Eventually Maree dismissed them all and set to work soaking the offensive garments. If her precious husband Ronald had been home, he would no doubt have helped her gain an appropriate perspective on the situation; her depression at his absence, however, only served to magnify the molehill which James was trying to wash off his shoe. Meanwhile, Truth, who had been bound up in Lie’s gossamer threads, fought her way out and in her delicate voice, vindicated Oz and Brit. Now Maree was even madder – she could add to her bullet list of Murphyisms a lying son and the humiliation of having wrongly censured the unfortunate friends.

The next day Maree took the boys to Century Forest where they had their midday repast, and in the afternoon they were due at a birthday party. Maree waited for as long as possible before instructing the boys to don clean apparel which was to remain clean throughout the celebrations so as to be in a fit state for church attendance, and then let them play outside for a short while with Brit, who was also to be attending the party. A quarter of an hour passed and then Maree called the boys to go. Her fury and disappointment at the highly visible and very fresh mud stains on their outfits was tangible; it found an outlet in a spectacular wheelspin on the loose gravel which did not escape the attention of her neighbours. Maree felt wretched; she knew her anger would benefit nobody and that she must quickly master it. It also occurred to her that insulting her children’s intelligence over an issue of dirt was neither godly nor helpful, but she could not seem to reign in her temper. However, by the time they reached their town destination she was sufficiently calm to confess her wrongdoings to Oz and Brit’s parents - in part an apology, and in part to lighten the burden by sharing it.

The moral of this story is unclear, as the story is unfinished; will Maree learn to get along with mud, knowing that as long as she has boys living in her house it will be an ongoing problem, or will she continue to exhibit a dazzling lack of self-control and cease to progress along the Christian path of sanctification? Will she be able to lower her expectations regarding boys and clean clothing, or must Joel and James stifle their expressions of boyhood and avoid mud? We can only pray that Maree will keep trying to pick herself up out of the mud.