day 16: when your daughter feels like the enemy

I had a completely different post in mind for today. But then God stepped in.

If you saw yesterday's challenges, the two focuses (foci?) for this week are learning to love God with all our mind and learning to love our enemies. In all the praying to God for Him to show me who I perceive as my enemy, I'd never imagine it would be my own daughter.

But when the enemy's been attacking your soul all day and when the sacrifices of motherhood over the years seem like just.too.much. and you wonder how you can continue to sacrifice even one more day and then your daughter, the one whom you're trying to help understand her math homework, shows you less respect and attentiveness than she does her teacher... well, it all gets wrapped up into one big ball of hurt and what do we do with a ball? We toss it back to the one who threw it our way.

Except she didn't and my daughter is not my enemy. I just forgot to take it to God in time to catch His grace instead of the enemy's garbage.

catching grace

And that's the genius of the enemy. He's sinful, but he's smart and he tries to distract us from seeing that he's the one doing the attacking. It's not really the ones standing before us. Or sitting beside us. Or blaring their horns at us. Or the ones we married. Or even the ones finding a way to destroy our civilization. They're just agreeing to his suggestions. And I did too when I yelled at Brianna last night.

In which case we both dissolved into tears and went to separate rooms to let God sort out our hearts. Which is what I should have done in the first place.

It's probably why Jesus told us, no, commanded us, to love our enemies. Because the best way to fight hate is with love.

And if I had remembered to put this into action (you can see yesterday's post on this too), I would have seen that the only truth I needed to deal with was Brianna's lack of obedience to God's commands. So today and for as many days as it takes, I'm going to carry around a piece of paper in my pocket with those words on it to remind me how to love God and others with my thoughts.

P.S. I used to think love = warm, fuzzy feelings. It doesn't. Read what real love is all about.

This week I'm learning to love God with all my mind and loving my enemy (a.k.a. the people I'd rather not have to deal with). Want to join me? Please click here for this week's challenges.

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