On the paths of life

Remaking Baby Steps part 1

January 9, 2010 at 7:15 pm (Uncategorized)

Mark 10:13-16 The people brought children to Jesus, hoping he might touch them. the disciples shooed them off. But Jesus was irate and let them know it. “Don’t push these chilren aay. Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are at the very center of life in Gods Kingdom. Mark this : Unless you accept God’s Kingdom with the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in.” Then, gathering the children up in his arms, he laid his hands of blessing on them.

Jesus states clearly that we must be like the children to find reconciliation with His Kingdom.Children are at their very core: honest, blatant, pure unhindered, and easily read. They are sinners, yes; but, children have an uncanny ability not to hold grudges or allow their mistakes to rule their life. They will after having said sorry to one another forget all about the offense.

I have witnessed this recently with my two year old son, Oren. He is now talking up a storm and as his vocabulary and understanding of his actions increases we have begun to ask him to apologize for his bad choices. the other day, while at my parents house. Unlike most parents, or in Oren’s case grandparents, my mom and dad still have young children at home. They have adopted a little girl, Abby, age 4, and have a foster daughter, Kayla, age 3 1/2, my son loves having built in auntie playmates. He loves going to grammy and papa’s house to “play with the kids”. The three of them were playing upstairs in between Abby and Kayla’s rooms, while the adults were downstairs talking. All of a sudden, we heard screaming, not the type of hurt screaming, but screaming out of anger and frustration. I ran up the stairs and called out all three children to the landing. They all sheepishly came out, knowing they were most likely getting in trouble.

I asked them simply, “What’s going on?”

Oren as innocently as possible says, “Mama, Oren hit Kayla”.

Abby, who may be 4, but is really going on 16 added, “Oren hit Kayla. Kayla hit him back. I told them they could NOT touch my toys, so I gave them one I didn’t want to share.”

I love that each of the two kids basically without meaning to tattled on themselves! They each had to apologize to each other, Abby for not sharing, Kayla and Oren for hitting. Know what happened next? They hugged each other and moved on to spend the rest of the day enjoying each others company.

I think we forget to move on as we age. We become cynical and our accountability andlack of honesty come into fruition. We hold grudges, make excuses, and are unable to make amends all to “save face”.

This is especially true with God. However, these actions as we age are an attempt to continue to keep track of our “frequent failure” miles (see frequent flier or failure blog)  and we begin to have utter disregard for God’s grace. At this point, we take back the failure card that we previously had given to Jesus to use our failures for his glory and we put it back into our own pocket. When we do this we may as well throw all of our past failures and put it back on the card. We’ve basically told Christ we don’t care what he did for us on the cross. We make light of His sacrifice.
Coming as children to Jesus, isn’t about being immature or believing without intellect, rather it is an act of denying our “adult” actions of insincerity, denial and cover-ups and saying, “Lord, I made a mistake. I’m sorry”. And most importantly, it’s about moving on. It’s about continuing to get up and being determined to start fresh and not letting the guilt and corruption of our souls eat away at us. It’s about experiencing LIFE with Christ and deciding to continue experiencing Life so He can make us pure.

I believe this is one of the first steps that we made in our faith. We accepted our sin nature asked for forgiveness and we moved forward in our walk with Christ because we had hope. This determination to come as a child to God with an attitude of repentence and willingness to move forward is NOT a one time thing. I’m not saying that you need to re-get your salvation, or that you lost it.Rather, I’m saying that we need to re-approach and re-make our baby steps towards the Kingdom. We need to let by-gones be by-gones and let God use the failures we have as his. As we saw Oren, Abby and Kayla do we need to apologize for our misdeeds and move on so that we can enjoy the company of Jesus. We need to move on in the hope that we are not finished that we are and can be complete.

The Holy Spirit is showing me that I need a lot of do-overs and a lot of patience. But, I have to choose to do them. I seem to be led astray by distractions, then guilt, followed by sin, followed by more guilt, followed by more sin. I’m deciding to stop that cycle when I first notice the symptoms of guilt and re-submit my attitude, mind, heart and soul to follow Him. I’m determined to not let Christ’s sacrifice on the cross be a waste because I choose to not let him have my failures. I want my frequent failure card to be His it’s too heavy for me to carry.