Last Saturday, we were having our BM Fellowship at the Boulevard staff canteen. As we were singing songs of praise, suddenly one of us saw that policemen had come to give summons to cars parked on the yellow line. Three ran out to move their cars to the car park. “We’ll pray,” I said to my son, and finished the prayer in my mind that Jesus would help.

All three managed to move their cars before the policemen reached them. In the car ride home, my son said, “When you do wrong, how can you pray?” I rationalised saying that we pray for God’s mercy so that they would not get the ticket, and even quoted an example from the Bible on a person praying for mercy although eventually he still suffered the consequences of his sin. “It is wrong, and you cannot pray,” my son asserted.

To him, a wrong is a wrong. A sin is a sin, and cannot be rationalised away. No wonder God loves the little children because their hearts are pure. Shame on me for showing him a bad example to follow. He also said “It’s not good Christian testimony to park on the yellow line.”

In the Bible, Balaam’s donkey talked. Here my son talked. In Malaysian English: “Already do wrong, still want to pray ah?”

By Ting Su Hie, Faith Methodist Church, Kuching