Legos are so great. My mom bought me so many sets. I played with them for hours and years. I loved following the instructions and making amazing creations. I am astounded by the incredible builds Lego engineers come up with. I just knew I never would have thought of them. I wasn’t the creative type.

She brought them to me a few years ago. I mean to my children. She carted them across the country even though I chose to live way too far from her. Ugly cry.

And the next sentence is going to send her to her grave, and make her turn over in it.

We dumped the Lego sets altogether in one bin and threw out the instructions.

(Heidi just told me that if she’s ever falling from a high height and she knows she will die on impact, she will call me and say, “Hi mom, I’m going to die, see you at the morgue!”)

Anyway, our Legos are all mixed together. Alex from Minecraft is chilling there with ninjas and underwater divers. And Jesus.

This decision was a huge one, and gave me pause. I knew that mixing them was irreversable. I would never be able to find every piece for the instruction again. And I would never be able to pay for a new copy of each set.

What kicked me over the edge was when Bryan suggested the children’s futures might be improved if they had the skills of an engineer and not just the skills of a factory worker following instructions.

That sentence was an indictment of myself. And it got me in trouble on a Facebook forum. “Rude!” A woman said, “This post hurts because my son doesn’t have a creative bone in his body.”

And that was totally me. When Bryan would play Duplos with the children he would make these incredible structures. Playgrounds, fruit, an elephant! Out of Duplos. I would make lumps. I was useless without instructions. I was a lump.

He told me to think of what you want to build, and then find pieces that will work. I have really grown in my awesome Lego creation abilities since following that advice. I am seriously so proud of some of the things I have made. My temple and my treehouse and my Model T give me so much more confidence than building from instructions ever did.

Creativity is not a bone you have or you don’t. It’s a muscle that you strengthen or you don’t.

When I hear people say, “I’m not the creative type,” there’s nothing I can say but I think they’re wrong. You can’t correct an adult, or make them see they have more abilities than they think.

But I can teach my children! And I can dump all their Lego sets together.

My kids learn so much from our Sunday activity, “Build a hymn out of Legos” or “Build a scripture story.” These have gotten so much easier when our other grandma gave us some Bible sets. And this is going to send her to her grave too: we mixed them in. The gospel is part of our lives! It’s not kept separate in a box! We use the figures so much! They’re right there where we can find. We’re not fighting over Qui Gon Jin anymore.

See you at the morgue.