How Grapes Got Me To Grow Up

I might have been the biggest kid to ever sit in a preschool and kindergarten class. I was well into first grade, and I had no desire to move on. Yeah, the chairs in the class were a little small, but I didn't care. I wasn't ready for the big time. Some of the older kids, who I thought were mean, were in that class and I just wasn't interested in spending any more time with them than I had to. Besides, at this point I had pretty much mastered the curriculum for the younger class, having been through it a time or two. I was always the smartest in the class.
My mom begged and pleaded with me to move on. Frankly, I think it was a little embarrassing. I wasn't as bad as the kid that threw a fit every time his mom took him to class (and that happened through like middle school), but I was still not advancing as I was supposed to.
I remember the 1st and 2nd grade teacher and my mom trying to convince me. I was pretty sure that I had made the right choice and they were going to get nowhere. And then the teacher said, "Next week we are going to talk about Caleb and Joshua." Suddenly, my interest was tweaked. That sounded good. My next door neighbor was named Joshua. We played together. I felt a little incentive to at least give it a try. (Besides, she gave them in the proper order. Caleb should go first, he stood up first.)
Now this may have seem like a boring, needless story to pass on to you. The reason I wanted to write about it comes from our chapel speaker yesterday. He was asking what is different about believers that grew up in church and unbelievers that did as well. He suggested that it was a matter of those certain experiences that made you feel like you belong and God wanted to use you.
For me that class was probably the first of those moments. Maybe it is silly to feel empowered just because you and your buddy have the same names as some OT spies, but for a first grader that was important. If a Caleb long ago could spy out a land, see giants, and then be such a leader for God, there is no reason I couldn't do the same. (Since then I have become far less interested in spying and giants.) What I'm saying is that for the first time it ceased to be a story time and became a suggestion that I could be involved with God's work. This was a big thing that I could be a part of. I guess you could say that it was my first taste of the Kingdom of God.