Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Extension of grace...to myself



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?!


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