God's Faithfulness in My Failures...Just bein' real

So, just a few minutes ago when I was writing that last post, my children started behaving child-like. How dare them! How dare them interrupt me when I am writing a blog post for the women of the world (or the 3 ladies who read my blog!). I mean, come on, I'm writing a post on deep freezers..obviously important stuff. I know you all agree with me and feel sorry for me and completely understand that I did not stop to parent them, but instead yelled at them to please stop so that I could have a few moments of peace! Right...you understand, don't you? Well, you might understand..though I doubt you agree with my actions, and God loves me too much to let me get away with it. So much so, that right afterwards, I checked my husbands' facebook page, and this article was his recent post (before I yelled, mind you...he knows what I need ahead of time, I guess! ha! ). Read article here. Ugh! Hit me right where it hurt..and it needed to.

I DO this. I AM this person. How many times a day do I feel like these little people are interrupting my life? How many times do I just yell and go off on them for daring to break the peace in the home (or even in my head) vs. taking a moment to parent them as God would have me. I needed to read this..for today and for every day. I do realize, in many of those moments, why I'm feeling like I'm feeling and I realize it's wrong. I thank God for his grace to remind me and not leave me stuck...or rather, not leave my kids stuck with a self-centered mom! Just bein' real here, ladies. Either you can relate, or you can't. Anyhow, it's an issue for me. And, I pray God will truly change me in this area.

Here's a small excerpt from the end of this article:

"... But my problem is that there are moments when I tend to love my little kingdom of one more than I love his. So I’m impatient, discouraged, or irritated not because my children have broken the laws of God’s kingdom, but the laws of mine. In my kingdom there shall be no parenting on family vacation days, or when I am reading the paper on my iPad, or after ten o’clock at night, or during a good meal, or . . . I could go on. And when I’m angry about interruptions to my kingdom plan, there are four things I tend to do.

1. I tend to turn a God-given moment of ministry into a moment of anger.


2. I do this because I have personalized what is not personal. (Before we left for the amusement park that day, my children didn’t plot to drive me crazy in the parking lot.)

3. Because I have personalized what is not personal, I am adversarial in my response. (It’s not me acting for my children, but acting against them because they are in the way of what I want.)

4. So I end up settling for situational solutions that don’t really get to the heart of the matter. (I bark and order, I instill guilt, I threaten a punishment and walk away, and my children are utterly unchanged by the encounter.)

There is a better way. It begins with praying that God would give you new eyes; eyes that are more focused on his eternal work of grace than on your momentary plans for you. This better way also includes seeking God for a flexible and willing heart, ready to abandon your agenda for God’s greater plan. And it lives with the confidence that God is in you, with you, and for you and will give you what you need so that you can face, with courage and grace, the parenting moment that you didn’t know was coming." (Paul Tripp)