Out of the mouths of babes

Hope that reading this makes you chuckle as much as it made me chuckle remembering this. 


Rewind to about 12 or 13 years ago.  The main character here is Roman ... he would have been about 2 or 3 at the time and was super cute and precocious.  Not that he isn't now, but you just don't say that about your 15 year-old-now-about-6-inches-taller-than-you baby brother, or so I'm told.  


Anyway, being the little kiddo that he was, we were very protective older siblings and tried to keep him from being scared of things.  One of the scariest things for him was the seemingly ever-present gorilla in most older movies (think Abbot and Costello kind of movies...).  The gorilla scared him to death.  So, our remedy was to tell him:

"It's not really a monkey - it's a man inside of a play monkey suit."

See?  Very true.  He shortened our too wordy explanation simply to:

"Oh! Monkey-man!"

Ok, we can live with that.  Exactly.  It's not really a scary monkey, it's a man pretending to be a monkey.  It worked so well that he decided to really like gorillas and monkeys and chimps.  Us older siblings were quite pleased that he was no longer scared and we could watch our Abbot and Costello movies without incident.


So ... enough with the background.  On to the story.


Here we were at a Kent Hovind conference in Erie, PA.  (For those who don't know, Kent Hovind is an apologetic creationist with a unique sense of humor.  Yes, I believe in a literal 6-day creation by God and this blog post is not intended to spark a debate.)  Anyway.  It was a several day conference in a large church with big screens and hundreds of people ... I loved it.  A bunch of my little friends from church were there and Mr. Hovind made paper airplanes with us during the breaks.  He kept our attention through the use of powerpoints and humor and engaging lecturing techniques.  


Towards the end of one of the last seminars, Mr. Hovind was wrapping up and we were all very encouraged on the evidence for a literal-6-day creation by the Lord God and how The Flood played a role in shaping the world today.  It's probably safe to say that there were select few who believed that we have "common ancestors" with apes at the conference. 


As Mr. Hovind switched to the next slide - for some reason - the entire auditorium was dead silent.  I'm serious.  Not a peep. Not a paper rustling.  Not a single baby crying.  The next slide appeared - a picture of a large gorilla.  Fitting in the context of the conference.  Suddenly ... a toddler's voice resounded across the entire, silent auditorium:


"Look daddy!!! Monkey-man!!!"


Ah, yes. Roman.  The two-foot-tall child perched on Dad's lap with a voice that could carry a little too well was definitely not afraid of monkey-man now.  The entire sanctuary erupted into stunned laughter as my Dad's face turned a shade of red that would make Crayola jealous.  Poor Mr. Hovind had no idea of the context for why this 3 year old would blurt out the exact opposite of everything we believed.  The conference resumed quite effectively ... but oiy, out of the mouths of babes!


This is one of those stories that I can't wait to tell Roman's kids.