Rain With A Chance Of Meatballs

By: Frank Coletta – (John at 5 years old, 1998)

John, our five year old son, is now a full-fledged kindergarten student. He is learning and growing with each new adventure, or is it catastrophe? Last week in class he was asked to write a short story, kindergarten length. I understand kids that age level write stories about two sentences long.

John came home from school with his story yesterday. His was an illustrated version with text. Above the text he painted a picture of rain clouds with meatballs in them. Above the picture was the stories title; Rain with a chance of meatballs.

I asked him why he chose meatballs instead of rain, snow, hail or sleet. He apparently thought (being Italian) meatballs made more sense. At dinner time the entire family applauded his short story with illustrations. Michelle (our oldest daughter) offered a perfect conclusion to John’s one liner story. It goes like this, “Don’t count you’re meatballs until it rains.” Now that’s wisdom from a child’s viewpoint.

Isn’t it great to have a family where you can say anything you want, foolish and even outrageous things. We need to laugh at ourselves from time to time and come down to earth. Life does go better with few meatballs.

Let us continue to grow in our longsuffering and patience with each other and all mankind. May we continue to serve Christ from whatever perspective we find ourselves in. We don’t all see nor experience life the same way. Some will look up and see only pain and toil; others will look up and see the same clouds but…with a few meatballs tossed in for color.

Some see a silver lining in every cloud, John saw meatballs….that’s a five year old for ya!