Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: Sneak (05/12/16)
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TITLE: The Circle of Mistrust | Previous Challenge Entry
By Taryn Deets
05/19/16 -
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“Lord, I don’t know how to do this. Show me how to be a better mother, so she can heal.”
And in the quiet, the silence with the darkness enveloping them she hears, “Child, you can’t be a better mother to make her heal, but I WILL, I AM.”
And her mother’s heart full of worship, her burden lifted, she pads back to bed.
***
How do you love someone whom you can’t trust? When you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that given the chance to tell the truth, this child would almost always choose to lie?
And why does she lie? Is she so hurt herself, that even though I am trustworthy she still doesn’t trust me to meet her needs? Perhaps because even as an infant in a faraway country, she had learned that no one could ever really be trusted to do that.
It is a circle of mistrust, but somehow if we are all to live as Christ calls us, someone has to step off the well-beaten circular path and choose to love even when filled with distrust. This is my job, not hers, and hopefully, someday, it will bear the fruit He wants to see in her. But it is an impossible job without Christ.
***
The mother, she asks her child, “Why is this jar that was full of chocolate chips yesterday only half full right now?”
A long pause, the child is deciding, struggling, knowing the mother already knows the answer. Should she blame it on one of her five siblings? Her eyes can’t meet the mother’s.
“I ate them.”
And the mother, her heart is frustrated, and she thinks only of the wrong the child did.
She tells her,“To pay for these things you stole, please go clean up the bathroom for our guests.”
Sad eyes now meet her mother’s glare and she turns and heads to the bathroom.
A day later, the mother, she sees the missed opportunity to offer grace in that moment, to do something to gain her daughter’s trust, but that she had instead focused on the letter of the law and all of the other times this child has lied or stolen something.
Hanging her head, she kneels again, this time in the bright light of day, and prays to the Father.
And she hears, “I know my child, I forgive you.”
So when the child comes home from school later today, her mother will step off of that circular path, taking her daughter’s hand, asking her daughter for the grace they both need.
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