Inside-Out.
The inside of our home has been teaching me much about the world outside it.
All the big problems start small.
All the layered issues, at their core, sprout from humble beginnings in the heart.
All the hurt and hate spilling from lips, keyboards and sound bites should not shock.
All the self-righteous finger-pointing has juvenile roots.
All I have to do is look in my home (and in the mirror) and see, even on our best day,
everything bad in the world stems from little hearts grown up with a natural bent towards selfishness.
The mornings when my child throws a startling temper tantrum as a showy response to hidden fears, a lunch box is thrown across the room, a pile of laundry kicked over and an unleashing of hurtful words leaving everyone ducking for cover tells me when our adult selves get scared, it is our child-like instinct to throw a word-constructed tantrum. When we're scared, we throw words...and sometimes more.
The times one sibling grabs the mini-ipad from the other because they feel their hogging the privilege of playing on it and they take a hard BITE of the offender's BUTT (this did actually happen, last week), tells me that our adult instinct is also to react first, think later. We are innately selfish...and when we don't give ourselves the space to think first, we take a bite out of the opportunity to have a healthy conversation later. {It took a good hour for the one with teeth marks in his deierrer to speak to the biter.}
The moments when I lock myself in the powder bathroom to keep myself from doing or saying something I'd regret to a child I GREW IN MY BODY and LOVE UNCONDITIONALLY, tell me that if I can feel this way towards someone I would die for, why should I be surprised there is rampant thoughtless care for the lives of others who make blind assumptions about them?
When, no matter how much I do for the pint-sized people I live with, they demand even more or no matter how hard my self-proclaimed "I'm-just-a-man" man does to try and ask the right questions/respond in the most helpful way to my stress and I still throw off an ice queen persona when he didn't get it exactly right...these things tell me our default is to demand and setting our whims and imaginary "rights" aside is a daily choice of the will.
It is hard being human.
It's easy to forget the the vats of goodness and love we can, at any moment, ask God to copy and paste in our hardened hearts.
I am reminded there is nothing new under the sun. Nothing new- except for the mercies God offers every morning. There is mercy enough to overturn my heart which holds it's own capacity for all the evil it fears and anger it feels towards those whose own seem so blatantly dark...and with that mercy there is enough Love enough to tackle the task of turning darkness into light where I can, which for me, starts within the walls of my own heart, and my own home.
This perspective slowly turns my heart away from rushing to judge. It tells me my tiny part of world change is very very important even when most days, it feels very, very thankless. Remembering that transformation is possible, but ONLY from the inside out keeps my focus in-check, and more on myself than on others.
All the big problems start small.
All the layered issues, at their core, sprout from humble beginnings in the heart.
All the hurt and hate spilling from lips, keyboards and sound bites should not shock.
All the self-righteous finger-pointing has juvenile roots.
All I have to do is look in my home (and in the mirror) and see, even on our best day,
everything bad in the world stems from little hearts grown up with a natural bent towards selfishness.
The mornings when my child throws a startling temper tantrum as a showy response to hidden fears, a lunch box is thrown across the room, a pile of laundry kicked over and an unleashing of hurtful words leaving everyone ducking for cover tells me when our adult selves get scared, it is our child-like instinct to throw a word-constructed tantrum. When we're scared, we throw words...and sometimes more.
The times one sibling grabs the mini-ipad from the other because they feel their hogging the privilege of playing on it and they take a hard BITE of the offender's BUTT (this did actually happen, last week), tells me that our adult instinct is also to react first, think later. We are innately selfish...and when we don't give ourselves the space to think first, we take a bite out of the opportunity to have a healthy conversation later. {It took a good hour for the one with teeth marks in his deierrer to speak to the biter.}
The moments when I lock myself in the powder bathroom to keep myself from doing or saying something I'd regret to a child I GREW IN MY BODY and LOVE UNCONDITIONALLY, tell me that if I can feel this way towards someone I would die for, why should I be surprised there is rampant thoughtless care for the lives of others who make blind assumptions about them?
When, no matter how much I do for the pint-sized people I live with, they demand even more or no matter how hard my self-proclaimed "I'm-just-a-man" man does to try and ask the right questions/respond in the most helpful way to my stress and I still throw off an ice queen persona when he didn't get it exactly right...these things tell me our default is to demand and setting our whims and imaginary "rights" aside is a daily choice of the will.
It is hard being human.
It's easy to forget the the vats of goodness and love we can, at any moment, ask God to copy and paste in our hardened hearts.
It is hard raising and living among humans yet learning how do so --and do it well -- is a noble pursuit (and I'm not just talking parenting here. I'm talking working this out in marriage, with your work family, your church family or any people you live among). "Change the world" is an impossible, lofty phrase which can only be made feasible when we take seriously the slice of "world" in which we live and have influence, starting with the zip code of our own mind and heart.
I am reminded there is nothing new under the sun. Nothing new- except for the mercies God offers every morning. There is mercy enough to overturn my heart which holds it's own capacity for all the evil it fears and anger it feels towards those whose own seem so blatantly dark...and with that mercy there is enough Love enough to tackle the task of turning darkness into light where I can, which for me, starts within the walls of my own heart, and my own home.
This perspective slowly turns my heart away from rushing to judge. It tells me my tiny part of world change is very very important even when most days, it feels very, very thankless. Remembering that transformation is possible, but ONLY from the inside out keeps my focus in-check, and more on myself than on others.
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Love you!
Mom
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