This week our seven year old son John started soccer practice at school. It’s his rookie year on a team and he’s been so excited about playing. A few days ago, before his first practice, he tore through the house searching for shin guards and cleats. His two older sisters and older brother are all soccer players. Plus last Christmas all our kids got new soccer cleats. Unfortunately, John outgrew his in six months.

So the other day, John found a pair of his sister’s old soccer cleats that fit him perfectly. Problem was, though they were black, they had pink strips across the toes and pink lining, along with pink rubber soles.

“Do we have a black felt pen?” John asked running up to me with the girl cleats in hand and a big smile on his face. “I’m going to fix these because I know you don’t have the money to buy me new ones.”

I was so proud of John being happy with those hand-me-down cleats. John spent the next hour carefully coloring all the pink off, then he and his little brother Joey went out and played a soccer game in the backyard until the sun went down. The following day the boys did the same, John playing like a prince in his painted shoes.

The day after this was John’s first school soccer practice. When he left that morning he was still grinning his missing baby teeth grin, talking about how perfect his painted cleats were going to be on the field, but when his dad brought him home from practice that afternoon, John was drenched in tears.

“What happened, buddy?” I asked in alarm. I put my arm around my little guy and he leaned into me sobbing.

“Soccer practice didn’t go well?” I tucked him close and ran my fingers through his short, red hair.

“They laughed at me,” he managed to say.

“I don’t believe it. You’re a good soccer player.”

“My cleats,” he cried. “Two kids saw the pink and made fun of me!”

My heart lurched. “Really? They made fun of you?”

“The ink wore off. They saw the girl shoes and laughed!” John pulled away from me and ran to his room.

I gave him a little time to calm down, then went and loved on him. “I’m so sorry, buddy. I’ll take you tomorrow after school and we’ll buy new cleats.”

“But you don’t have enough money right now…” His big blue eyes drowning in tears tore me up.

“Don’t you worry about that.” Right then I would have sold the farm for a pair of size twos. “God always gives us what we need,” I assured John.

And for the past decade God has been proving this to me, I reminded myself as I ran my debit card today at Payless Shoes praying our account wouldn’t bounce buying those cleats. I don’t know if I taught our young son the right lesson by getting him new cleats, but on the way home, we talked about what makes a good soccer player, your heart not your shoes, and why it’s important to never laugh at others that way. We also talked about kids in Africa who play soccer barefoot.

“Your sister’s cleats would make those little African boys so happy,” I told John, being the proper church lady teaching our boy the basics of Christianity 101, you always mention Africa.

Staring at me earnestly from the backseat, cradling his new cleats like a beloved bunny, John said, “But I still don’t like being laughed at.”

Oh, the honesty of a child…

Being honest with myself, like my son in that moment as we drove down the road, I wasn’t dwelling on the poverty of Africa. John goes to a private Christian school. Yet not everybody is there because they love Jesus. Some parents buy their kids a good, safe, moral education just like they buy the best soccer cleats. I imagined it was these privileged kids who had hurt my son. I envisioned the parents flying down the road talking on their BlackBerries unconcerned that their children in the backseat mesmerized by a movie were spoiled.

And then I realized there was no privilege in that. And that poverty of soul far outweighs physical poverty. That perhaps a new pair of high speed soccer cleats might not be such a gift after all. Not when added to a mountain of materialism that strands a child’s spirit in a lofty, lonely place.

In that instant of understanding, ten years of my life fell away and I remembered what it was like trying to purchase happiness for myself and my kids. The mindless trips to the mall. Buying our children whatever they wanted. My husband was a pilot in those days and the money rolled in and rolled out again just as fast, and yet like a Rolling Stone, I couldn’t get no satisfaction. I recalled how sad I sometimes felt. How empty in my designer clothes. What was the point of life anyway? I wondered back then until Jesus rescued me from all that.

Did the parents of the kids who crushed John on his first day of practice feel this way right now? Were they headed for the mall or the bar or a place of entertainment to numb themselves to that longing for something more? That hunger in humankind for God that is often fed about everything under the sun as Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, wrote about in Ecclesiastes.

Solomon said, “Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure…” But that didn’t fill him up. Solomon goes onto say how he then tried to find satisfaction in work, but he says, “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done and on the labor in which I had toiled; and indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun” Ecclesiastes 2:10-11.

Solomon concludes that the whole purpose of man’s existence is to, “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all” Ecclesiastes 12:13.