Life can get crazy as I try to live responsibly. Trying to create a balance between the
“best” choice and the “best I can do right now” is hard to make. I was struggling with this balance recently
as I was unloading the car to get the boys and myself to school/work. We arrived at the church and I decided
that since my back had been hurting the week before I would not carry all five
bags and William, but leave my stuff in the van. In the time that I went inside to drop them off and then to
the van it had been broken into and my purse stolen. Nothing was permanently damaged, so all is well and
that’s just part of life….well, that’s what I’ve been telling myself. The hardest thing for me in this is
learning to extend grace to myself. I’m trying to let it go, because I was
trying to make the “best I could do right then”, but I guess it wasn’t such a
great decision after all. I mean I
know better than to leave my purse in the car. Maybe you have no problem with your hiccups and bad
decisions, but I just can’t seem to shake them sometimes. Sometimes I’m haunted by them because I
can’t extend that grace to myself.
I think this can parallel to what we do with parenting
sometimes. I mean we try to make
the right decision, but sometimes fail so miserably. I can forgive Steven for making a bad choice, right? I mean
sometimes it takes a bit more than others, but I still extend grace…..then why
can’t I do that to my own self in life and more specifically….parenting. I mean we don’t make the worst
decisions as parents, right? We
have bad days and better days, but how many times do I get so frustrated over
the bad days that I can’t embrace the good ones? In a seminar I heard that some research from the Fuller
Youth Institute suggests that it’s not necessarily the mechanics of your
parenting, but the warmth in your parenting that creates an environment that
leads to a relationship that leads to talking about the ultimate extension of
grace…the extension from God to us….so why can’t we extend grace to ourselves
in our hiccups?!
