Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

"Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die."

I saw this quote on pinterest and I think it is so right on. It goes along with something I’ve been thinking about lately, which is the nature of forgiveness. As Christians, or even just as people if you don’t believe in Christ, there’s no other way to live than to be forgiving. It should be like breathing. It should be automatic and easy, but because of our sin and natural proclivity to selfishness, it’s often not. But letting resentment build and never confronting the offender, or just truly letting it go and forgiving, is a sure way to kill your own heart and soul. It’s a gradual death though. It begins with a minor offense that you think you’re letting go of, but really you’re stuffing it into a file cabinet in your mind to be brought out, added and compounded the next time a minor offense happens, and it seems a little bigger and you get a little more angry and a little more resentful. Not dealing with it is not the same as forgiveness. It also robs the other person of the chance to seek forgiveness and fix the behavior. Before too long, everything seems like a major offense because you’re holding a long list of minor things together against the person at once. Not telling the person with whom you are upset, and instead somehow thinking they ought to know, is naive at best, and desperately wicked at worst. It deadens your heart and conscience as you push away the Holy Spirit and allow your evil nature to take over. And it’s a sure way to let once-valuable relationships be destroyed by Satan. I’ve seen this attitude destroy friendships and marriages. Isn’t a potentially awkward, maybe painful, conversation worth it to avoid this soul-deadening and relationship-destroying slippery slope?

“The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
‘“I the LORD search the heart
and test the mind,[b]
to give every man according to his ways,
according to the fruit of his deeds.’” Jeremiah 17:9-10

Is your heart attitude leading you to life or death?

In Defense of Children

We've all seen that kid. Screaming, having a tantrum, talking back, making a scene. It's always awkward, and it's even more so when the parent either doesn't do anything, or worse, screams back. This post is not about that.

More often than not when I go out to eat and my almost-3 year old is along, I get treated shabbily. This has happened in various combinations: My hubby, son and I together were passed over for seating for almost an hour, before we said something and were begrudgingly given a seat at a local family steakhouse, where my boy went on to charm our server and the families sitting near us. The 3 of us plus my best friend, her hubby, and daughter once went to a somewhat nicer Italian restaurant, and were treated like second class diners by our server, who did not hide her irritation with us and our kids BEFORE WE EVEN SAT DOWN. The manager took care of business though after noticing we were not happy campers. My BF and I took our kids out to eat during a shopping excursion and were seated in a hidy-hole corner like we were lepers. Neither of our kids have ever had a screaming melt-down crying fit of any sort during these times. I take it all servers expect all little guys to act like the above mentioned hellions, then preemptively ignore and/or mistreat those tables without waiting to see what kind of table it's going to be. I wish all those servers and the one random hostess could have seen what I saw on Saturday.

I took Edward to his first big Easter egg hunt at a pastor's house. The teenagers hid the eggs for the younger crowd, and left lots of eggs in plain view for the under-3 set. The toddlers went out to hunt first while the other little kids heard the Easter story. It was great fun as my son and all the other munchkins carried their baskets and picked up eggs from the ground. No tantrums, no trying to grab each other's eggs. Then the older-little kids came out, and every single one of them walked right past where the easy eggs were "hidden" and the little guys were toddling around picking them up. Not one of them stopped to get an easily-placed egg. It's like they just all automatically knew to let the toddlers have their fun, and they would walk til they spotted harder to find eggs. Nobody compared baskets, nobody cried because they hadn't found a special prize egg, nobody tried to knock down anybody else. Everyone was just so happy to be there. It seriously could not have been a better experience. That many kids plus candy and excitement and no behavior problems? Incredible.

Because I know what I know, that my boy can behave in public, and so can all these other kids, I'm going to keep doing what I do. Maybe through our actions, we can turn the tide of this discriminatory attitude that people have towards parents with small children. I know the hunt on Saturday wasn't an anomaly. I believe we outnumber the occasional public temper tantrum thrower. Who's with me?