The longer they are home, the more grateful I am---really. I love who my children are inside--and that somehow they are still all idealists.
Last night, after a dinner of homemade soup and a great movie, most of us were sitting around in our den looking at our computers and phones and checking to see if anyone had loved or noticed us in the last 2 hours. :)
Then we all started commenting on statuses of friends old and new on facebook. Then we started judging a few pics and choices and things that had happened to people......
Then one of my kids said, "Just look at us, we are all sitting around being petty--we need to stop being gossips and get off of facebook and just keep enjoying this great night."
He was right.
I can have a quiet time and walk out the door and be impatient with someone in my family who I love--and get angry.
I can be committed to encouraging women in the Lord and read all sorts of books and pray and have quiet times and still I am shocked at what silliness and selfishness can bubble out of my mouth without any contemplation.
Wretched woman that I am......
And then I read Romans 8:1, "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."
"I came to set the captives free," He said.
I am captive to my own human frailty, my own limitations, my own small-minded self.
But he saw me in my need and decided to have compassion. He gave me grace, He came and love and lived so that I would not have to live in this captivity to my own limitations of my human, sinful self.
Today I am so very grateful that He came, He forgave, He sees me as though I am not little in spirit, but He sees me with the eyes of His love that covers my fragile state of being.
I had cancer of the soul, and He became my anecdote, my healing.
The older I get the more grateful I am,
and the more I see my need and pettiness and selfish heart,
the more I am so very grateful for His grace
and the more I receive this grace in the midst of my own need,
the more willing I am to extend His grace to others, assuming that maybe, just like me, they need it, too.
And so today, I have realized that everyone in my life means well, just as I mean to be good, but has probably fallen short, just like me.
And today, I see that everyone I know needs His Christmas grace.