No Bible For You!

Friends, if you're feeling guilty because you felt you haven't been the best mother lately, let me cheer you up.

I'll take you back a handful of months, more acurately a year.  Little Miss and I are in Hearts and Minds Bookstore, my most favorite place on earth, and I'm picking out a music CD.  I've decided that I'm going to spoil myself.  I love music and I rarely buy it because that seems like such a frivolous thing to buy.  Books and music are the best things in life (with a bottle of wine making a close 3rd - sometimes it ties with #1), and I go to libraries to feed my reading habit and I listen to the radio to feed my music habit.  But one day I decided, so what if there are so many other important things to buy (like milk, medicine, and vitamins for the kids), I'm going to buy a music CD instead.  I took Little Miss because I had no other choice.  As I'm sifting through what I concider an unorganized mess of CD's, Little Miss is looking at Bibles.  She comes to me and says she really wants a Bible.  I put her off.  I really must get a CD.  I don't have enough money to buy a Bible.  "Not right now," I tell her, "Christmas is coming up." 

Christmas comes and goes.  I've visted the bookstore one more time, again with Little Miss.  Again she pleads with me.  She really wants a bible.  I feel like I'm dealing with a third world child - one who's from a country with less than 2% of it's population being christian.  This should tell me something, a little voice says.  But I ignore it - I really must get that book.


Lately the kids come out of Sunday school saying the teachers want them to bring their bibles to church with them.  At first I can't figure out why.  They can barely read!  But they keep talking about it.  And I half hope that the church would take pity on our children, perhaps thinking they come from parents who don't go to church and would never go to church, and give our dear little children bibles for free - that way I could spend more money on books and CD's. 

But no - no free bibles.  Dang it. 

So, this week I ordered two bibles off the internet for the kids.  They can't wait for them to come.  They asked if they would be here in time for church today, and I had to tell them "no." 

Meanwhile they are at eachother's throats, picking and teasing eachother all day, and I'm almost to the point where I'll threaten canceling the bible order.  "No Bible for YOU!"