Children

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Every now and again, he makes the same mistakes and you can’t help but feel angry. It’s not as if you can get used to the flaws that always irritate you to the bone. You’re different, you’ve been clear to him about this, but does he even care? Is he even trying to change at all?

My son and I have had our differences. You’d think your own child would be the least of your problems and yet, because you want so much for him when you see him not giving enough attention to the things that will help him achieve the best, you want to open up his brain and get him to understand you no matter what.

Nevertheless, we all know that that is not how things work. It doesn’t matter how much good you want for your child, what matters is how you get your point across to him—and many times that’s where we fail.

In order to get him to do better, we pressurise, punish, set limits, hold things back, manipulate, and yadda, yadda, yadda. Notice how negative we can get for wanting something good… it shouldn’t be like this, should it?

It seems to me that when we want something badly, we do whatever it takes, and that may sometimes include doing the opposite of what we really mean to. A child, a husband, or a friend will have a hard time understanding that, and who can blame them?

Relationships can only work with true love, you know, the one from the source, as God defines so clearly in I Cor 13.4-8:

“Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”

In other words, when we push people to be like us or to be what we want them to be, we’re not acting out of love at all!
It’s hard to hear this, don’t you think? How many things do we tolerate, and how many times are we patient all in the name of love? …I know, it’s sad. Here we are thinking that all this time we’re acting out of love when in truth, we’re just pushing our loved ones away. But the good news is that it’s not too late to change!

We only change when we realise that we need changing.
If we can realise that ‘whatever it takes’ can sometimes work against us, we’ll do better—much better. And we can start by changing with our family.

Accept your differences and work around them, knowing that whoever thinks that change is needed, is the one that’s in need of change.

My son and I have never been as close as we are now. He’s almost 15 and who could imagine that a teenager would feel this way about his parents?

As I accept him for who he is, he accepts me for who I am; and so we not only feel closer, but we change because we want to, not because we were told to.


In faith,
Cristiane Cardoso
www.cristianecardoso.com

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