Who’s Leading Who?

Who is leading who?

I’m the Mom right? I should have my act together. I should “be perfect.”

I mean “I totally have my act together!”

Um, I think I can make that believable?

As parents, shouldn’t we have it all together? I mean we are here raising the next generation. If we don’t teach our children right from wrong, how to be good people and good Christ followers who will?

So in my life of teaching my kids to be awesome, I often have to remind them to turn their shirts right side out.

Yup, I know I’m the only mother on the planet with this problem. Here I am, alone, holding the torch of getting my kids to wear clothes properly. Can you taste the sarcasm?

Anyhow, so I might not be alone in my kids clothing fight, I might be alone in my own. You’re wondering what I meant. Aren’t you?

So the long convicting story is; pretty much every morning I tell my 7 year old to switch his shirt around. It gets tiring, I get really frustrated having to tell him every day, but I do it with the hope that someday his wife won’t have to. Well, then I was out on a date with my husband, we were sitting in a very packed restaurant, and he said “Is your sweater inside out?”

I did one of those deep inhale kinda things and said, ”Nooo” before I even looked. Then I saw it. I saw that my sweater sleeve had an inside out seam! He, being the thorough hunk he is, proceeded to look for the tag. Sure enough it was on backward. Luckily enough, my hair is long enough to cover the tag and I changed my sweater right side out in the bathroom. Ugh!

In the middle of all this, yes, I was convicted straight through the heart. I thought about the famous verse in Matthew 7:3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” A sucker punch right to me.

Now I’m not saying that in this particular situation that I cannot keep correcting my son, I most certainly think I can and that I’m supposed to. I think this verse came to my mind to remind me that I have no right getting angry at my son for messing up, when I am still messing up.

It’s easy as parents to lose perspective that for our kids these little things are big deals. I imagine that God handles it better when we as adults struggle with the same stumbling blocks over and over, than we do as parents seeing our child struggle with the same thing over and over.

Grace is the biggest lesson that I learned through this humbling moment. I need to give more grace. God has blessed me with so much grace and I need to spread it around.

Blessings