Can I get real with you about living at home during a pandemic!!

I want to share with you a story that happened just the other day.  I was downstairs taking care of something in the kitchen and I heard a loud noise coming from the living room.  My two girls were playing on the floor and one of them accidentally knocked their foot on a guitar that was leaning up against the wall.  It fell with a loud clunk, and the noise frightened both of them.  One daughter turned to the other and accused her sister of knocking it over.  The one who knocked it over felt guilty, was sad and worried that the guitar might have broken, was frightened by the noise and was angry at her sister for calling her out.  So she stood up and stomped out of the room angry and crying bitterly as she made her way up to her room.  It ended with a loud slam of her bedroom door.

I thought to myself, “Let me give her just a few minutes to cool off, and then I’ll go up and make sure that she knows that everything’s really okay.”

When I got up to her room after a few minutes, I opened the door.  When I looked on the floor, I discovered that while she was up there, she had taken a little box that keeps her bible verses – small verse cards she gets from Miss Angela in Kidstown and some that had been hand printed by my wife Julie – she’d taken each one of the cards out and ripped them up and scattered their pieces all over the floor.  All the verses were torn in tatters as she sat on her bed sobbing. 

Suddenly I turned from just going upstairs to comfort my daughter and to walk her back from her extreme emotions to being angry that she had acted so reckless and careless with something that was so important to us.  It was as if all her inner turmoil and probably her frustration and anxiety that has been building over the weeks we’ve been in the house just bubbled to the surface at that moment.  It was also a moment when my inner turmoil and emotion began to rise up and I began to express my anger and disappointment with my daughter.  It wasn’t a good moment!

I realized I needed to back out and let things cool down a bit and reengage in a few minutes.

After a little bit, Julie and I came in and sat down and talked about the sadness of what she had done.  We talked about how special these verse cards were to us and how they represented God’s character and love for us  - and how He calls us to live.  We told her that, instead of watching a show on TV with her sister later that morning, she was going to take time to repair the damage of what she’d done by taping each card back together.

And so we sat together and did that at the craft table.  Now I didn’t expect that moment of fixing what had been ruined to become such a beautiful moment. We sat down at the table, we laid out all the pieces like a puzzle, we brought together the halves and the thirds of each one of these cards and began to tape the verses back together.  As we were doing that, I was reading all that was written on those cards.

One of the cards I putting back together said, “Here’s what love is.  It’s not that we loved God.  It is that he loved us and sent his Son to give his life to pay for our sins.” 1 John 4:10

As I taped that torn card back together, it was as if I was reenacting the truth of those words.  God loved us so much, he paid for our sin. To heal up our brokenness.  To put back together the pieces of our lives that often get tattered and torn apart. I found myself with tears in my eyes in that moment and my daughter and I began to talk about what that verse meant for us when we do wrong.

Maybe that’s a lesson we all need to be reminded of during this season of being sheltered-in-place.  As our own inner brokenness makes its way out and demonstrates itself in a lot of ways, we have a God who meets us with mercy and loves us through his forgiveness and restores us and offers us a new start. 

 Psalm 103:8-14 says:

⁸The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
    slow to anger, abounding in love.

¹⁰ he does not treat us as our sins deserve
  or repay us according the wrong we do.
¹¹ For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him;

¹² as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

¹³ As a father has compassion on his children,
    so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
¹⁴ for he knows how we are formed,
    he remembers that we are dust.

 

God knows our inner failings, he knows our weaknesses and frailties and he is quick to meet us at our points of brokenness and offer us mercy and grace.

^“The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
    slow to anger, abounding in love.”

Prayer