It’s amazing to me as a mother what my children treasure. My oldest son has for years collected plastic bottle caps. Why is unbeknownst to me yet he has a fondness for those orange plastic caps. Each of my boys have found pleasure in bringing me rocks of all shapes, colors and sizes. It really is the small things in life. As a child I was fascinated with a bottle that sat in my parents room on my dad’s dresser. It was a clear, glass bottle filled with marbles. Reds, blues, greens, oranges, yellows. They were all there. I always just assumed my dad was a master marble player. Later I’d find out that he just liked marbles…never even played! Those marbles still intrigue me. Why marbles in a glass bottle? I guess I could ask the same of bottle caps or rocks.

Our oldest son has started taking extra time at night to read before bed, which usually means I miss tucking him in because he goes to sleep a little later than his brothers. Last night I heard the bathroom door open so I went to his room with hopes of tucking him in bed. He was sitting there about to turn off his light when I came in the room. He smiled and I tucked him in. Now this kid is so easy to read, when something is troubling him you can see it all over his face. He looked up at me and ask, “Mom, what is religion?” I was a little surprised by the question seeing as his dad is a pastor and he has been in church since nine months before he was born. He pulled the book he had been reading down and showed me the page that made him question. I quickly read the passage and tried as best I could to answer his question. Here are a few things I shared with him:

1. Religion is mans way of trying to earn heaven.
2. Religion often weighs our deeds.
3. Religion is something we carry – good and bad.

As I talked with him, I thought about those marbles that sat in that bottle on my dad’s side of the bed. Religion takes one marble and writes one deed on it. And it does so for each good and bad deed, thought, and attitude each day. Then we must carry those bags of marbles until we die. Religion says that if somehow our good deeds outweigh our bad deeds, heaven it is. The sad truth is that we are crushed under the weight of all our deeds – good and bad. My son said that it was like a line or two from Black Beauty, a character had “fell down with great force” and “he walked as if he were in great pain.” That is what sin does, it cripples us as we try to live good enough. Religion is us trying to get to a higher power or a heaven of sorts, all depending on which religion is followed.  Christ, however, came to us to carry our burdens to the cross so that we could have a relationship with him that would not crush us. He was crushed for us and defeated death, hell and the grave so that we could walk with Him. Doesn’t mean our life is perfect or easy. It does mean Jesus carried the weight for us because He loves us. The burden He gives us is love – for God and one another. And how we live that out daily is in obedience to Him.

So today, and everyday, I am choosing to treasure my relationship with Christ, instead of marbles of good and bad deeds. I’m choosing to take His yoke because it “is easy and His burden is light.” (Matthew 11:30)