The power of love...

I had a rather profound moment with one of my kids yesterday and I wanted to share it.

I walked into my classroom to find two children during a time when they were supposed to be outside.  I tell them to head outside to play.  One does, the other stays where she has planted herself...on the floor in the corner.

She has her backpack sitting next to her, she just arrived a few minutes ago and she did not give me a hug - which she does every single day.  She is being a little sulky and I ask her "why aren't you playing outside?"  She answers "I can't...because my leg hurts."  I say I'm sorry that her leg hurts, and remind her that she is not allowed to be in the classroom at this time, but we can sit outside together.

She has a colored pencil in her hand and I have already asked her, "Is that your pencil or mine?  It looks like my pencil."  She answered "It's mine, I brought it from home."

I tell her to put the pencil back in her bag because it looks like my pencil and I might confuse it and try to keep it, and say "After you put your pencil away come and sit with me!"  I can tell she is feeling down...she is never this sulky... I wonder if she's getting sick.

She comes, with the pencil and her backpack and sits in my lap... I ask what's wrong... no response.  I tell her I'm sorry she is not feeling well this morning and give her a hug.  She leaves her head on my shoulder, arms around my neck...acting like she is about to cry.  I hug her longer and tell her "I love you so much...and guess what...God loves you so much.  You are so special!  I'm sorry you are having a hard morning, but I am praying that it will get better."

She sits back...looks at me with tears in her eyes... and holds up the colored pencil.  She says "Ms. Cynthia... here."  I have this short moment of confusion and then I realize... she was taking it when I walked in.  I happened to walk in as she was about to place it in her backpack.  THAT is why she is so sad...she feels guilty.

I look at her and the tears in her eyes and I take the pencil.  I say "Oh, this was my pencil and you were going to take it home?"  She nods her head, so sad.  I ask her to look at my eyes and I tell her "I am so very proud of you right now.  Thank you so much.  Look at this good choice that you made.  I am proud of you for telling the truth and I love you just as much as I did before."

I was shocked...the bravery that it took for her to do that, tears in her eyes.  But the illustration that God gave me out of this... WOW.  In the midst of her doing something naughty... taking something that belongs to me, sinning against me... I showed her love.  I hugged her and comforted her and told her how loved she was.  She clearly saw that I believed that this was her pencil...but she chose, instead of keeping it, to face the shame of confessing her sin and giving it back to me.

God, let me be so brave as this sweet little 4 year old when I have made a mistake.  Let me be so anchored in your love and my awareness of your love for me that I bravely stand up in the face of my poor choices and make things right.  The power of love... there are no words to describe it.

I am thankful to God for the countless examples of his love for me that he is showing me day after day.  So very thankful!

A new thing...

I am in the process of learning a new language, and tonight I have all these (super-deep) thoughts in my head about how learning a new language is so much like the process of healing…or whatever you want to call it when you take the messy parts of your life and try to make them less messy.  I call that healing, probably because that’s what others have called it.  But it’s something that we all do right?  We all have trauma and we all have to heal from it. 

One discussion that I have had with many people, on many occasions: there is no level of trauma that is “too small” to be considered.  Trauma is trauma and we all have it.  At first glance it may not make much sense, but it’s only our minds that put levels and degrees on everything and make this worse; or that better.  It’s only our minds that say “you think you have it bad, you don’t know bad…wait till you hear what happened to me.”  Your worst experience is your worst experience…and, sure…maybe when you put it next to someone else’s worst experience it suddenly doesn’t seem so bad anymore – but it’s still your worst.  Whatever caused you the most pain, ever in your life, is just as bad as whatever caused me that level of pain in my life.  Only one of those things might be dramatic enough for a lifetime movie marathon – but the level of pain it caused is still the same…in my opinion.  (oh…and just fyi…you cannot convince me I’m wrong on this…it’s not possible.  So I guess this isn’t really an opinion, it’s more of a belief)

So – back to my purpose – sorry for all the words.

To me - learning a new language is a lot like the healing process (like how I summarized first thought there?) because I hear a new word in Swahili and my mind tries to relate it to an English word – but they may be totally different (for example “–lake” goes onto the end a word to specify ownership and my mind wants to relate it to “lake”.  The two aren’t even similar) and I realize that if I try to memorize it this way…the meaning of this new word is going to get all jumbled up in my mind and confused at some point.  It’s like that with healing.  If you have a learned, unhealthy, way of coping and you set out to change that, it’s easy to just relate the old unhealthy behavior to a new behavior…and then it becomes unhealthy too.

I experienced this in my own life.  For a long time, I never even stopped to consider if the way that I was surviving life (because that’s all I was doing…surviving, not living) was healthy or not.  I didn’t really have time to care because I was too busy with all the craziness going on.  Eventually – with the help of a trained professional – I recognized that I needed to remove some harmful behaviors from my life.  But no matter what I did I ended up with only slightly less unhealthy behaviors.  The problem was - my desire for the way the behavior made me feel and my need for something more was still there, so I was just taking the new “healthy” behavior and searching for ways to have it make me just as “good” as the old one did.  I was relating the new thing to the old thing, and thereby corrupting the new thing. 

Skip forward a few years…I now had a relationship with God.  I now knew that I had been searching all along for something to fill a void that he fit perfectly into.  But my relationship with him suffered because I was constantly stuck in old, negative behaviors.  I knew they weren’t healthy, I knew they created a wall between me and him – but I couldn’t get away from them.  Then one day, I was driving to work and I was repeating a verse in my head about how the old has passed away and I am made new in Christ.  I felt this desperation come over me and I told Jesus “I can’t wait until I am new and the old is gone” and his reply to me was basically “I can’t wait until you realize that you have BEEN new…it’s done…the old IS GONE…you just don’t realize it”.

I had to think on that for a while.  How could I be new…when I was still behaving the same old ways?  Because… I was still relating the new thing to the old thing, and…you guessed it - corrupting the new thing.  My mind thought that I had to still be the same old person because that’s who I had always been.    This next part offended my mind quite a bit – but here it is… all I had to do was stop giving in to the temptation to return to these old behaviors.  But that seemed impossible to me…that I could turn around and walk the other way.  My mind couldn’t grasp the fact that there was a brand new me already in place that didn’t need those old things anymore.  I had already learned a new language and didn’t even need the old one anymore…but I was too afraid to step out and start using the new words!  To go one step further…I couldn’t even see the new language because I was focusing so hard on the old one!!!  This realization was so freeing for me.  It opened huge doors in my healing and allowed me to step past some negative things that had seemed to be glued to me before.  I was able to drop them and walk away. 

So – this may have gotten a bit rambly…maybe my path was a little twisty  :) but I think you get the point I am trying to share.  Maybe it’s more like three points – 

1. We all are broken in some way…there’s no shame in that.  Even if we end up broken into tiny pieces, there’s no shame.  It’s just that much more amazing when God creates a *new* life out of the broken pieces.
2. Our minds cannot grasp or comprehend the healing, restoring power of the Holy Spirit and what all is possible when we surrender to God.
3. Sometimes, all it takes is seeing ourselves the way GOD sees us.  If we would live like we are the person HE sees…man…what a changed world this would be!

Wait..I’ll add a fourth point – feeling temptation to sin isn’t the same as sinning.  (That one took me a while.)

Ok…I hope this isn’t too jumbled...I actually think it’s quite amazing just because of the emotion that’s attached to it for me.  (strong ones just so you know)  God is all powerful…there is nothing that he cannot do.  He is most certainly in the business of reclaiming, restoring and redeeming.