I love Jesus, but I’m still mean sometimes. Why hasn’t grace been enough to change me? If I’m a new creation, why do I still act like my old self? None of the self-help tips are working to make me nicer.
The house is a mess. (I mean a REAL mess. For reasons I will not go into here, we recently moved…in the middle of a pandemic…into a 50-year-old house that needs updating…but we will have to DIY most of those updates ourselves because of our budget…except that we are not “handy” people. So the house is a mess.)
I’m covid-schooling my six and eight-year-old which consists of 10% schooling and 90% me saying things like, “I’m not going to help you if you don’t straighten up.” And then never following through on my idle threats, because of course I’m going to help them. How are they ever going to get a day’s work of online classes finished if it takes them over 20 minutes just to move the mouse smoothly enough to write their names on the line?!
I’ve been cranky with my husband because we’re around each other ALL. OF. THE. TIME. He’s been working from home, and I love him, but we were not made to interact only with each other. We need people. We are both introverted, but we still need people! And we need space. From each other. From our messy house. From our home-schooling, sloth-speed-computer-mouse-moving children.
WWJD? Why can’t I be more like Jesus when I’m stressed? Why can’t I respond in kindness and see the big picture instead of getting edgy and uptight? I have the Holy Spirit in me. How do I let him out? I sometimes feel like he’s a genie trapped in a bottle.
Well, I may have an answer, or at least, a partial one.
About three weeks into this packing, moving, pandemic, homeschooling, messy, no breaks lifestyle that we’d been living, I crashed in front of the TV and found one of my favorite program’s from childhood: Little House on the Prairie.
It was an episode in Season 1 shortly after the Ingalls family had moved to Plum Creek. The girls had just started school in Walnut Grove. The show was highlighting the mother, Caroline, and I found myself in tears by the end of it. Throughout the scenes, she proved to be so kind. Tough, but still so tender. Supportive. Self-sacrificing. Brave.
At the end of the episode, we see Laura reading and essay about her “Ma” and just how wonderful she is. It made me want to be like Caroline Ingalls. And you know what? I left that 25-minute break on the couch a little lighter.
Sometimes the key to change is not correction or exhortation but simply inspiration. We have everything we need in the Holy Spirit to live out of our new selves. But sometimes we don’t even know what that looks like. Not until we discover it in another human that is already living this way.
During my ten years living on the mission field in East Asia, my directors (a married couple) modeled to me what transparency really is. The wife in particularly showed me what it meant to invite others into your home and into your life no matter if it was clean or not (your home and your life). She taught me to put people above perfection and sharing a meal above completing a task. She was the Mary to my Martha.
She inspired me by allowing me to see what it means to live like Jesus outside of Sundays. Her life was open to me and to all of us on the team, as was the life of her husband and family. We didn’t need an appointment to drop by. By permitting us access into their real lives, we learned how to pray, how to encourage, how to show hospitality, how to represent God in “great missionary callings” but also in the mundane chores of life that must be attended to no matter which continent you live on.
Observing her grew my heart. I wanted to change because I saw how lovely the transformation could be. Just how beautiful holiness was. Like the grinch who stole the entire Christmas collection of Whoville was inspired by the love in that little community when they gathered together despite his attempts to ruin their holiday.
Jesus inspires me in the same way. I didn’t know humility until he opened my eyes to see him entering Jerusalem on a donkey. I didn’t know acceptance until I saw him allow the scorned woman to wash his feet. And I didn’t know relationship until I saw Jesus shatter the religious traditions of man.
Sometimes we need another person to show us what Jesus meant, to show us what God looks like. To inspire us to be more than we thought possible. To break us out of our boxes.
I had begun to believe the lie that everyone was cranky and mean and impatient under stress and felt justified in my sinful responses, until I watched Caroline Ingalls on my TV screen. There are real people that are living like Christ day in and day out. I pray that God would lead me to inspiration that would transform me more into his image. And that when I see someone living as he would, I wouldn’t allow envy to overtake me or judgement to dismiss why this person is able to do what I find hard to attain. I pray I would allow the inspiration to stir up a longing in my heart that cries out for change until it is birthed in me.
Yes! That’s why mentoring/discipleship is so needed! Thanks for sharing.