I'm a dingbat.

As I was getting ready for work this morning my ipod was playing through some songs I hadn't heard in a while. When the old, churchy favorite "Everthing that Has Breath" came on I cracked up laughing at how appropriate it was at the moment for me.

Let me explain.

One of my brothers, who for his ego's sake will remain nameless, was as much of a character when he was younger as he is now. And I remember a day, quite vividly, as we were driving home from church, that he displayed this character in the form of an honest and earnest question.

"Stephanie, what is a dingbat?"

What? For the life of me I couldn't figure out where this question had come from. Now being that it was my brother, and this type of situation was not unusual, I didn't dwell on the source of the inquiry to heavily.

But how to answer it. Well, to my then eleven-year-old mind, a dingbat was quite simply a social misfit. (Not that I used terminology like "social misfit" at that age. Otherwise I would have known how to categorize myself. Hehe. Synonyms like dork, pest, idiot, etc did come to mind.)

After explaining this to him, as best I could, he nodded thoughtfully, obviously processing this new information in his young brain.

"Well," he finally said with a shrug, "I guess we should praise the Lord that they have breath."

It took me a minute, but when I finally understood my brother's pondering I couldn't stop laughing and agreeing with him. When we sang "Everything that has Breath" in church that morning my brother's lyrics went more like this:

"Every dingbat, every dingbat, every dingbat has breath. Praise the Lord!"

Although tempted to let him continue on with this train of thought I gently explained to him the true words. He and I both agreed that his made for a better song.

And in a way, he's right. This morning, in hearing that song again, I found myself praising God that, although I am often a dingbat, He is gracious to me in giving me life and allowing me to have it abundantly.

I have breath. Praise the Lord!