Many failures, much grace

The past week or two have been quite a mess for me.  I have been making silly mistakes everywhere.  2+2=3 mistakes.  Only my mistakes have been bigger, affecting those around me.  And they haven’t been private ones either.  They are the kind I must fess up to to fix.  Ugh.  Humility.  In the humiliating sense of the word, which then leads to the virtue of humility, humbleness.

Earlier this week my little girl wanted to write a letter to her Nana.  She had messed up on one page and discarded it.  I sat by her and took her discarded page and began to write my own thoughts down.  Trying to get them out of my head.  Terrible, berating thoughts.  My sweet 5 year old first born asked me if I was writing a letter too.  No, I told her, I was just writing my thoughts.  Kind of like a journal.  She said “Oh, you’re writing your thoughts….So you’re writing about God.”

I was crushed.  If only I had been writing about God.  But no, I was only writing of my own failures.  I was forgetting God’s grace.  And my sweet five year old reminded me.  She reminded me just in her assumption that my thoughts must be about God.  What grace of God!  That on days when I feel like I have failed at just about everything I put my hands to, He shows me that my daughter believes that all of my thoughts are about God.  What else matters in the face of that?

“Prone to wander Lord I feel it;
Prone to leave the God I love.
Here’s my heart Lord, take and seal it;
Seal it for Thy courts above.”

Lord remind me.  Help me, even in my failures, to keep my thoughts on you.  And thank you for your grace.  Grace that shows me that all is not lost.

Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.  Teach them to your children,talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates,  so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land the Lord swore to give your ancestors, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth.  Deuteronomy 11:18-21

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