"Give ear to my words, O Lord,Consider my meditation.Give heed to the voice of my cry,My King and my God,For to You I will pray.voice You shall hear in the morning, O Lord;In the morning I will direct it to You,And I will look up."
---Psalm 5:1-3
It is easy to direct my prayers to God, to give Him my burdens. The hard part, for me, lies in verse 3--looking up to Him in expectation of an answer. I am a do-it-yourselfer. I don't struggle with feeling incapable or needy, but rather I struggle with thinking I can manage everything on my own, that I can do it my way.
There is a struggle that I see in my children that is a perfect mirror image of my own struggle. I find this to be extremely frustrating because if I can't fix it in myself, how can I fix it in them? I realize that no matter how great I am as a parent, my kids will go into the world with burdens to bear simply because we live in a sinful world and no-one is perfect. But I do hate to think that I have equipped them with my own burden, as if I packed it up and fitted it specifically for them to carry. This is hard knowledge to accept.
In my reading time this morning the words "I will look up" felt important to me. This is the element that I so often lack in my struggle. I need not only to give my burden to God, but I also need to look to Him for help and guidance so that He can change my heart and my ways. This will better equip me to help my children to navigate through the struggle themselves.
I suppose that the more I see this struggle in my children, the more I am desperate to allow God to fix it in me. Often I think that parenting is not as much about the kids as I think since it provides such a perfect opportunity for God to force me to look squarely at myself by looking at them. Nothing else in life affords this kind of introspection.
Today I will look up. Yes, I will look up.
There is a struggle that I see in my children that is a perfect mirror image of my own struggle. I find this to be extremely frustrating because if I can't fix it in myself, how can I fix it in them? I realize that no matter how great I am as a parent, my kids will go into the world with burdens to bear simply because we live in a sinful world and no-one is perfect. But I do hate to think that I have equipped them with my own burden, as if I packed it up and fitted it specifically for them to carry. This is hard knowledge to accept.
In my reading time this morning the words "I will look up" felt important to me. This is the element that I so often lack in my struggle. I need not only to give my burden to God, but I also need to look to Him for help and guidance so that He can change my heart and my ways. This will better equip me to help my children to navigate through the struggle themselves.
I suppose that the more I see this struggle in my children, the more I am desperate to allow God to fix it in me. Often I think that parenting is not as much about the kids as I think since it provides such a perfect opportunity for God to force me to look squarely at myself by looking at them. Nothing else in life affords this kind of introspection.
Today I will look up. Yes, I will look up.
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