"The most important thing in our belief system is not our behavior. It's the roots."
One morning last week I opened my eyes to the Peanut standing over me hysterically crying.
"Mama - I had a bad dream. It was REALLY bad."
She wanted to tell me every detail of the dream.
I'll confess - I wanted to go back to sleep.
I finally accepted that she needed to say all the bad things out loud. She needed to tell me what she believed was true.
Even if it wasn't.
She needed to hear me say "It was scary to think that was happening. It was frightening to believe it was true."
Then, and only then, was she ready for me to speak truth.
This summer I walked a long parenting struggle. One that caused me to question not only my effectiveness as a mother but also a human being.
The data was looking like a bad dream. Like maybe I hadn't done as good of a job as I had hoped.
I'm thankful for my quarter friends who let me say out loud all the things they already knew weren't true.
Who made space for the bad dream run down. For days on end.
And then, who spoke truth to me.
Who reminded me with specific examples how I had loved each one of my kids.
How I yes had made mistakes, but always in love.
Mama Warriors, I hope we are all people who make space for the bad dream run down.
Who gift our people space to process the lies.
And then who remind them of the truth.
This is that space that I think many of us jump over in our prayer life. We give Jesus the run down - all the things that are going wrong that we'd like some help with. Jesus take this wheel I'm tightly holding on to.
But then we don't sit in silence to wait for truth to be spoken back to us.
We don't gift the space for the truth that will fight the bad dream.
When Peanut was a toddler we started this song.......
"Bad dreams, bad dreams go away
Good dreams, good dreams here to stay." (thank you Gray's Anatomy)
There's space to say those bad dreams out loud.
But then let's make space for the good dreams to grow.
No comments:
Post a Comment