What my Children Taught Me about Grace

James 4:10 "Humble yourself before the Lord, and He will exalt you."

 

When we try to teach about grace, mercy, and compassion, we sometimes forget that we all still have a lot to learn about those very subjects.  That’s the beauty of teaching really, as you learn you teach and as you teach you learn.  The more you show your kids about a Christian lifestyle, the more you learn because they are looking at the same picture from a different point of view.

This really came to head for me last night, into this morning.  This past weekend, we did a bit of changing up, moving my 3 year old into my oldest son’s room, and gradually moving the baby into the nursery with his older sister.  This obviously is a huge change for everyone in the house and it was met with a few difficulties.  Not many, over all the whole process went pretty smooth, but last night was…interesting.

My 3 year old had played pretty hard during the day and had taken an impromptu late nap, which I’m sure any parent will attest to; late naps lead to being awake late at night.  So he’s in his room, with his older brother, being a general nuisance.  Now anyone reading this that’s had a roommate can probably relate to this very problem, you’re trying to sleep and your roommate wants to do everything BUT sleep.  Naturally my oldest boy was not getting the amount of rest he desired, but here is where things got interesting.  He did not complain.

He is a creature of habits, of routines, more so than most people, and often when routines are disrupted, this can lead to some really bad moods on his part, but he didn’t complain.  We talked about it as I was taking him to school this morning and I told him how proud I was of him not getting upset with his little brother’s behavior.  He said “He was going to go sleep eventually.”  Sure enough he did, but to have that kind of patience, for most adults, is a very difficult thing.  I think it’s difficult for us because we have this desire for the illusion of control in our lives.

The fact of the matter is none of us are in control.  Not 100% of the time, not 10% of the time, there are so many outside factors that can alter the course of our day, our week, our month, our entire lives that the best we can hope for is exerting some illusion of control, tricking ourselves into thinking we have inflicted our will upon the world.  What my oldest son did was something that I myself struggle with.  Let it go, let things play out as they will.  Trust that someone who has authority over the situation is handling it, even if we can’t see the results immediately.  My son trusted my wife and me to handle the situation, we were the authority here, and it we were working on it.  He trusted us so much, that he let himself go to sleep despite the disruptive behavior of his brother.

That directly leads to our relationship with God.  God is our parent, our authority, the one in control of situations.  When things go caddy-whompus on us, we need to take it to God, and ultimately ride it out.  Yes, we look for solutions, but through prayer we let ourselves be let to the solution God wants for us.  It may not be the easiest solution, it may not be the solution we want, but it’s the solution God wants for us.  Yes, my son had to “ride out the storm” but he trusted that the best solution to the problem at hand was coming.

Do we Friend-Zone Christ?

So I was sitting in RCIA yesterday and a song came to mind.  The group is Vertical Horizon and the song is “Everything you Want”

“He's everything you want

He's everything you need

He's everything inside of you

That you wish you could be

He says all the right things

At exactly the right time

But he means nothing to you

And you don't know why”

 

It occurred to me that, I’ve always taken this as to be the anthem of the guy in the friend-zone.  For those of you who have no idea what that is, it when a person has a crush on another person, but the person they have a crush on treats them only as a friend…at best.  It applies to men and women equally.  Now I’ve loved this song for years, because it really does nail that dynamic between the two parties…but like I said, it occurred to me during RCIA.  So I jotted a note down really quick so I could get back to the class, but it’s been sitting there in the back of my head until it finally occurred to me…and the revelation has probably already hit you by now…this could easily describe our relationship with Christ.

 

“But Michael…” I hear you say “That’s just the chorus of the song.  Surely the who song can’t apply to our relationship with Christ.”

 

Wanna bet?

 

“Somewhere there's speaking

It's already coming in

Oh and it's rising at the back of your mind

You never could get it

Unless you were fed it

Now you're here and you don't know why”

 

I am really trying not be sarcastic here, so I’ll just say it straight…this applies to everyone going through existential crisis, trying to find meaning and direction in life.

 

“But under skinned knees and the skid marks

Past the places where you used to learn

You howl and listen

Listen and wait for the

Echoes of angels who won't return”

 

Every single time we call on God during a crisis we feel his presence, but then we wonder why His presence isn’t there 24-7, solving every single problem we encounter.  How many times do we make the same mistake more than once?  It may seem like the angels won’t return, but we’ve seen the solutions…we just need to acknowledge that God has given us the answer we just need to stop making the very specific mistake.

 

“You're waiting for someone

To put you together

You're waiting for someone to push you away

There's always another wound to discover

There's always something more you wish he'd say”

 

Sometimes we live off conflict, we project our pushing God away as Him pushing us because then we can validate our problems, feel defined by our struggles because we want the solutions to come to us.

 

“But you'll just sit tight

And watch it unwind

It's only what you're asking for

And you'll be just fine

With all of your time

It's only what you're waiting for”

 

We have a tendency to ignore problems, even though we could be taking actions to resolve them.  A popular one is money, where we are out of a job and waiting for an opportunity to land in our lap, but in fact we need to put in effort to find opportunity and figure out a solution in the meantime.  How many are out there waiting for the right job, when they could have taken over a dozen “right now” jobs?

 

“Out of the island

Into the highway

Past the places where you might have turned

You never did notice

But you still hide away

The anger of angels who won't return”

 

Just because you are angry at a situation or a problem, doesn’t mean it’s a problem you should be angry at.  I mentioned this on Facebook yesterday, which a lot of life’s problems are like clothes tangled around a washing machine agitator.  If all we do is tug as hard as we can on the part of the problem closes to the top, ie the most convenient part to reach, all we are going to do is frustrate ourselves and cause that coiling knot to get tighter.  We get frustrated at life’s problems because we want the solutions to be easy, but they rarely are.  Pretty much every one of life’s problems can be resolved by calmly getting to the root of the problem, which may be uncomfortable and hard to see, but its there.

 

I am everything you want

I am everything you need

I am everything inside of you

That you wish you could be

I say all the right things

At exactly the right time

But I mean nothing to you and I don't know why

And I don't know why

Why

I don't know

 

Christ says “Come to me, I am here for you.  I can help you.” But we are resistant for reasons that defy logic.  Maybe, again it’s because we feel defined by our struggle, like it makes us important, but Christ already thinks we’re important and wants to carry you to a resolution of those problems.

 

Basically, we friend-zoned Christ and we are poorer for it.

But What if I don't WANT to be Compassionate right now...?

“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” Ephesians 4:32

So I was mulling over what to talk about today, and this is something that comes up on a very regular basis, especially when you are a parent: How do you channel God’s grace when you really just don’t feel like it?

We, as God’s children, are called to use God’s love and our savior Jesus Christ as an example, a gold standard of who to emulate on a daily basis, but for parents that’s not always that easy.  Everyone can be kind and gracious when they’re rested and unrushed.  Its four o’clock in the morning, when you’ve just finally drifted off to sleep after the 3:45am potty-run, and now they just want to thump on the wall next to their bed.  It’s when you’re late for work and there is a line of cars, when you’re trying to exit a parking lot and the person directly in front of you doesn’t want to budge for…whatever reason.  It’s when you’re in line at the cash machine and you keep looking at the clock because you know if you start dinner ten minutes late it’s going to throw everyone off their routine.

Wait…what was that word, routine?  People are, by and large, creatures of habit, we like things to follow a specific pattern, and take comfort in that pattern.  When that pattern is interrupted we get frustrated because we fear the consequences of changing that pattern.  Or, if it’s four o’clock in the morning, we are literally just too tired to function like a rational human being.  Our routine is broken and that upsets us.

Having our pattern changed throws us off of who we want to be.  We suffer under the pressure of the world around us, because if you take a step back, it is less about how that change up is affecting us directly, and more how it affects our interactions with others.  Our kids frustrate us when their schedule is thrown off, they’re either awake way too early or they are fussy as all get out because they’re hungry and don’t have the social, mental, or emotional maturity to address those feelings.  Who has to fix that?  Well, we as the parents do, so now we’re under more pressure. 

It’s when we just don’t feel like being compassionate that we absolutely need to bring it out of ourselves.  A quick prayer can sometimes do the trick, taking a second to take a deep breath and focus entirely at the problem at hand.  You may not get back to sleep right away, or at all.  You may not make it to work on time, or dinner might be ten minutes late, you probably aren’t going to re align your schedule back right away, but we need to be compassionate, forgiving and remember that nothing in life is perfect except for God’s love.  Again, this isn’t easy, but nothing about being a follower of Christ is. 

Further, everyone who has ever studied human interaction can tell you that if the parent is panicked and frustrated, the kids will follow suit very quickly.  That’s because we steer the ship that is our households, and if we are on edge and angry, then that is going to have a direct effect on the children.  Kids are basically a barometer for the “weather” of the household.  Want to find out if the household is functional?  Look at the kids.  If they are moody and on edge on a regular basis (not just from time to time as all kids are) then something may be amiss in the home.  That’s a good time to offer some help, find out if everything is okay, as clearly something significant is affecting the parents.  If you notice your friend who doesn’t have kids is on edge, they may need someone just to ask “How are you doing?” because they don’t feel they have anyone to talk to.  The short of it is that we don’t know how we can help those around us unless we actually ask.

Communication is the key to compassion and grace.  The person in front of you at the cash machine may be having some difficulty using it.  The person blocking the exit of the parking lot may be having some difficulty.  Your short tempered friend may just be tired and need some help.  But how does that help you, if you are the one offering the compassion.

When we offer compassion, God works through us, the Holy Spirit uses us to fulfil God’s will, and that actually has a massively calming effect on us.  We communicate with those around us, meet their needs, and we are calmer for it, because we understand that it wasn’t just someone trying to screw up our day, but rather someone we could actually help, or at least we have a better understanding of the situation.  When we make it to work or we get home, yes our routine is still thrown off, but we aren’t frustrated by it.  That calm we carry is then passed on to those around us and we calm the house or we calm our work place.  Kids deal with being off their schedule just fine, when everyone is calm and cool about it.

Back to 4am, staying has the same affect.  We may still be tired, but we aren’t burning energy we don’t have on frustration, we are at an even level and can maintain ourselves throughout the day a little better.  Staying calm lets the children also know that everything is fine, and they may actually fall back to sleep because of it.

Also, parents…tag team.  God arranged it to where there are two of you, help each other.  Case in point, let’s says one of you has to get to work that morning, but you don’t leave until say…7:15, 7:20am.  You both get up; you get ready while the other stays with the child, then when you are ready, tag the other parent out so they can get back to sleep.  You’re already awake, dressed and ready to go.  Then at 7:15, the other parent has gotten some more sleep and will be better prepared to take over.

Cooperation, communication, compassion, grace, all of these things come from God and work towards making our lives better.

Telling Old Adam to Shut Up…

Being married is not easy.  If it was, everyone would do it and marriages would last forever.  And it does not matter at all what kind of marriage you have, whether you are traditional or LGBT, you are going to run into a conflict of egos.

So what is the ego?  Well, boiling away mountains of psychology, its “me, myself, and I”.  Its where we focus on ourselves, our wants, and our perspectives.  Your ego will get in the way of your marriage.  That’s just the way it is.  So how do we counteract that?

Well the starting point for understanding our ego is to go back to Adam, in Genesis 3:12

“¹²The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”  Immediately we see the ego in action, where Adam does the classic maneuver “defend and deflect”.  What is “defend and deflect”?  This is where we avoid responsibility for wrong doing by claiming our actions were sound the actual fault for the situation lies with someone else.  We are actively redirecting blame elsewhere.  In this specific case we see Adam claim no responsibility because God gave him Eve and she gave him the fruit.

Moving to verse 13, “¹³Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”” Yes, Adam pulled a jerk move by placing the blame firmly on Eve’s shoulders but then she shifted that blame onto the serpent.  It’s one long string of tattling on someone else.  Now through the eyes of the ego, we wonder “Why are they getting punished?  Clearly they got bad advice from a talking snake.”

Well, we get bad advice a lot, but it’s up to us to take action based on our analysis of that advice.  We make the decision on what we do with ourselves.  Eve didn’t have to pick the fruit and eat it.  Nowhere in scripture did the serpent hold a weapon to her and force her to eat it.  She did that all on her own.

Now Adam couldn’t have been that far away, because she doesn’t search for him, she just goes to him and offers him the fruit.  He knows what that fruit is, where it came from.  All he had to do was say no.  Further, why was he that far away from her?  What was he doing while she was talking to the serpent?  His job was to be her protector and teacher.  She got instruction about the tree not directly from God but from Adam who interpreted God’s word.  This indicates that Adam, if anything, had become complacent in his responsibilities to his wife.  He can blame God and Eve all he wants, but it was his responsibility.

So that’s where we are on our ego, it boils down to protecting ourselves by pushing the focus and blame elsewhere.  That affects our day to day married life because there’s always something that rears its ugly head to cause conflict, whether it be bills, discipline, scheduling, cleaning, it doesn’t matter.  Something will cause a conflict at some time, and our ego will tell us that it’s not our fault, that it is the other person’s fault.  Well I promise you nothing will lead to a faster argument than blaming the other person.  Let’s follow a hypothetical situation: The kitchen needs cleaning.  It hasn’t been cleaned in a week.  Our ego says this is the other person’s fault because we’ve had stuff to do, we’ve been busy with work or school or a hundred other projects and the other person could have been doing this.

That’s us on the defensive.  We immediately raise that shield to prevent being pegged for responsibility for the problem.  Now we go to our partner and say “Why haven’t you cleaned the kitchen?”  Already that question places the responsibility for the problem squarely on one person’s shoulders.  “Why didn’t you do your job?”

Well, you’re partner has been busy with keeping track of the kids, doing laundry, bills, a hundred other things that have taken focus and energy away from the kitchen.  They respond with “Well, why haven’t YOU cleaned the kitchen?” and the responsibility has been deflected back on us.  Suddenly we have this game of hot-potato going except everyone’s mad and nobody realizes the game is actually taking care of the problem.

The kitchen is still needs to be clean.

Let’s go back to the beginning.  The kitchen needs cleaning.  Old Adam is reminding us that we’ve been busy at work and all that other stuff, and we need to shut him up.  Did we stop and think about what the other person has been busy with?  If we have enough time and energy to invest in arguing about a dirty kitchen, we have the time and energy to invest in cleaning the kitchen.  Marriage isn’t about deflecting responsibility, it’s about sharing it.  You don’t wait to be asked to clean the kitchen.  Children have to be asked to do chores, married adults just do them.  You and your partner are just that, partners.  Partners share the responsibility so that no one is overwhelmed by the things that the world throws at us.  It’s not about assigning tasks; it’s about working together to get the job done.

The First Big Step...

The best way to kick this off is, I feel, to start with forgiveness.  Really and truly its where we should all start because it’s one of the hardest things that we, as humans, have had to do.  For some reason we like to hold onto old hurts, to re-open old wounds.  We think we’re validated by pain and regret so we hold onto when others inflict pain on us and when we inflict pain on others and ourselves.  For some reason it’s our thing and really if you are going to move forward with life then you need to let all of that go and forgive.

So, how do we forgive?  Getting down to the basics there are three forms of forgiveness.  You have your conditional forgiveness.  That’s where you say “You wronged me, and I will forgive you, but you have to perform a certain task or make a specific commitment first.”  The second is transactional forgiveness, which is close to conditional but much looser.  It states “I will forgive them, but they have to ask for forgiveness first.”  This can be problematic towards reconciliation because the other party may not realize that they have wronged you in the first place.  Reconciliation is the act of bringing two parties together to hash out what went wrong and find a mutual starting point to heal their relationship.  If your forgiveness is dependent on them coming to you and asking for it, and they don’t know they did something wrong, well then reconciliation is going to be hard to come by.

Then there is unilateral forgiveness, and this is what Christ calls us to.  He really does, he calls us to it quite directly.  One major instance of this is when Peter asks him about the nature of forgiveness in Matthew 18: 21-22.  Peter asks how many times he should forgive his brother.  “Seven times?” Peter asks.  Jesus tells him not seven times but seventy times seven.

Let’s break that down because it’s not as convoluted as it seems.  Peter did not pull a random number out of the air.  Peter was born and raised Jewish, so he was quite familiar with the structure of the faith, and he knows that seven is a sacred number, it symbolizes completeness.  This goes back to the story of creation where God created existence in 6 days and rested on the 7^th because his work was “completed”.  You don’t stop working on a project until you’ve completed it.  At least you shouldn’t.  The point is Peter is asking Jesus “Is the number for completeness sufficient for our tradition?”

Jesus’ response is not a math equation.  Okay, it is, but that’s not what he’s saying.  Jesus doesn’t say “You should forgive your brother 490 times.  But on when he hits 491...he's done.”  He’s saying you need to forgive beyond completeness.  You need to wash away the sins, clear the debt, move past the wrong doing.

The second time he addresses this is on the cross, in Luke 23:34.  He says “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Now out of our three forgiveness options, which one does that sound like?  He didn’t say “Forgive them if they ask for it.”  He didn’t say “Forgive them if they are willing to put in 200 hours of community service and wash your car.” He said called for forgiveness even when the offending party was not aware what they were doing was a sin.  He literally asked for our forgiveness while he was being brutally murdered for public spectacle.  I can’t speak for everyone, but I know I haven’t been wronged THAT badly.

So we know that Christ calls us to unilateral forgiveness, but what if the offending party is you?  What if the one person you can’t forgive is you?  Same thing applies.  Christ is calling you to forgive that person in the mirror because as far as Christ is concerned, you are not beyond redemption.  Who are we to put limits on God?

What is All This About

Well, my name is Michael Bauch.  I've been blogging off and on for about two years now, and have a background in creating content for churches by way of on-line Bible Studies.  Specifically I ran the Mobile Ministry for the Fishers of Family Lutheran Church based out of Portland, Texas.  Well, since that church closed it's doors, I pretty much put all that content aside and move on.  Its been more than a few years since I've done anything like that and I've since joined the Catholic Church, and started RCIA yesterday (9/11/2016 as of the date of this writing).  With that in mind, I wanted to re-kindle those old fires and start talking about this new step, the continuing journey of my faith.  So, in a very loose sense, I'm inviting you to join me on my journey.  I share my personal revelations about faith and God's work in my life and I invite you to comment with your own experiences and even offer perspective on my musings.

Welcome to my Journey Through Faith.