There’s a lot about parenting and faith and life that, much to my accounting dismay, does not fit in a formula. But here’s one lesson that kinda does.
When you think about others MORE, you tend to think about yourself LESS. When you add some to the others bucket, you subtract some from the worry about me bucket.
It is a life lesson I want my kids to learn and implement. Shoot, its a life lesson I want to be better about learning and implementing. Which is why this lemonade stand was so encouraging.
Because from the first preparations
to the final CHEERS at the end of the morning,
We learned from our lemonade stand that helping other people has so many benefits.
You have fun. And you grow. We were all exhausted after this three hours, but the kids were quick to add it to one of their favorite days EVER and ask when we could do it again (I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’ve only got one lemonade stand per summer in me.) And for a little while in the fun we were all thinking about something other than the fact that its been just a little crazy in our own world. It was like I could actually see the boundaries of the world-view for 7 kids stretch a little.
You learn about your strengths. We went around the dinner table after the lemonade stand and talked about how cool it was to have such a big team with so many people to contribute something different. (I’ll admit- this was a “fake it till you make it speech- kinda convincing myself as I went). We decided KJ was awesome at collecting money and engaging the customers so they knew our purpose.
Cbug was a pro at directing traffic and sticking to his task. 
AB was caught on film helping other kids, littler than himself, pick out toys and know how they worked. 
CB was great at helping pour and doing jobs others didn’t want to do- like holding open the cooler.
Lou was great at making sure we used the scooper, not our hands, to get the ice and serving with a smile. 
BB was good at TRYING REALLY HARD not to take all the toys we were selling and instead helping (re)organize them.
Tito, we all agreed, was the absolute best at running around like crazy in all his cuteness.
You build a team. There’s been a lot around here of combining toys, sharing rooms, who has ever seen such-and-such movie, who has been on what trip, whose turn is it. But you know how many of us had ever had a lemonade stand before? NONE. We were all in this one together. For the first time. And together we had one goal. United.
You enable other people to help other people to help other people. When you help someone and then they help someone, you see how community works best. The cool thing is earlier the same week these amazing people came and worked in our yard.
Which took something off of our long list of craziness. Which freed up some time Saturday morning. To help us raise money. To help a team of people.Go to Africa to help people learn how to spread the gospel to other people. I mean. SERIOUSLY.
From pulling some weeds in Texas to the Good News spreading in Africa. YES!
And those, my friends, are lessons you can only learn from thinking a little less about me. And a little more about them.
The math is simple.
ABL
