Discipleship and Direct Objects

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Discipleship and Direct Objects

Confession: Indirect and direct objects never made sense to me. This is not spicy information except that I’m writer, a former writing teacher, and a former writing curriculum writer. (Whew.) The point of all those inbred terms is this: based on my skill set, indirect and direct options should have made sense, but they didn’t.

(Don’t worry—this is not a post about grammar. I wouldn’t do that to you. I also wouldn’t do that to me.)

I suppose I could have asked for extra help from one of the many teachers who taught indirect/direct objects to me, but I didn’t care that much, and it didn’t seem to matter much. I also have this problem in which I don’t pay attention to things that aren’t interesting to me (I’m working on it), and it’s hard to ask for help when the truth is that you just couldn’t bring yourself to pay attention, and worse, you suspect you’ll zone out again the second the teacher starts answering your question. Man, I’m a gem.

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Simple Discipleship for Ages 9-13

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Simple Discipleship for Ages 9-13

On a recent chilly night, I put on a pink hat (a…weird decision since my hair is purple), so my four-year-old daughter wanted to wear her pink hat. Our commonalities go deeper than headwear: She sways to music the same way I do, loves The Great British Baking Show the way I do, and on this weekend’s donut run, my husband said she dramatically sighed and said, just like her mother, “My nerves are shot.”

Though parenthood is far from formulaic, it’s still fraught with plenty of this kind of inadvertent copy-pasting. We experience a similar phenomenon as adults when we catch a glimpse of our reflection in the mirror or hear ourselves talk and think, “I am my mother!” Replication happens all the time with parents and their kids, and often the stakes are higher than pink hats and reflections.

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