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Bad Habits, Hand-Me-Downs and Choosing Grace 
Some days, you must choose grace.
Not just to give, but to receive it, take it in, soak it up past the superficial skin and let it seep down deep into your soul, into the places of self-condemnation and records of wrongs and mistakes and imperfections.
Like yesterday.
It was a day of frustrating grocery shopping with lost coupons and a store that hadn’t stocked the chicken that I needed for almost a week’s worth of family meal planning.
And having to skip out on my exercise because I had to trek to a second grocery store to find said elusive chicken so I could feed my family more than one meal in the next seven days.
Then I finally unloaded it all at home, over-budget, discouraged, and frustrated with my non-exercising self for messing up my fitness plan.
As I sorted the groceries onto shelves and into drawers, I noticed the dirt in the corners of my kitchen floor, the apple juice splatters, the toothpaste in the bathroom sink, the laundry piled in the basket.
Wow, I just can’t ever keep this house clean enough.
And that writing project I planned for the day…didn’t get done.
There were the three tantrums from my preschooler at the school library and the devotions I put off until 9:00 that night.
At the end of the evening, after dinner and bath time, and after my kids didn’t practice the piano, I read one chapter in a book to my daughters and sent them off for “independent reading” before lights out.
It had rumbled inside me bit by bit all day, but as we finished up that little bit of reading time together, my daughter reached over and turned down the corner the page to hold our place.
And I felt the full rush of failure.
I’m a page-turner-downer from way back. Despite a lovely, inspirational, unique and large collection of bookmarks, I fall back on a long-established bad habit. I just dog-ear my page and snap the book shut.
Unfortunately, it’s a bad habit I’ve unwittingly passed along to these daughters of mine. In fact, it’s so extreme they’ve even coined a term for it, transforming the word “chapter” into a verb.
“Mom, don’t close the book until we ‘chapter it!” they say and I dutifully slip the corner of the page down.
In that moment I thought: I’m passing along my bad habits to my children, handing them down like ill-fitting jeans and worn-out shoes.
Unfortunately, some of them aren’t as immaterial as dog-eared book pages–like stressing perfection too much, having too little patience with ourselves and others, and not accepting grace in the wake of messy failure.
This is why my oldest sobbed in frustration as we studied for her big science test the other day. Because she forgot the definition of one term among 30 and felt like a big horrible failure.
I assured her with a hug and an uplifting of her chin so her red, swollen eyes looked up to mine: “Baby girl, you’re doing awesome. It’s okay to make mistakes when we’re learning! And even if you get it wrong, you’re doing your best. You’re working hard here. Isn’t that what counts? Isn’t that the point? And don’t you know that I love you no matter what?”
Oh, but I recognize the source of her hand-me-down of perfectionism in my own mirror.
Don’t we all have days where it seems we meet with more failure than success? Where Satan can barrage us with reminders of the mistakes from long ago and the crazy mishaps of today.
Where every mom on Facebook seems to have it all together, gourmet meals for their family, a spit-n-shine house, Martha Stewart-like crafting ability, time to bake, snazzy Scrapbook pages, award-winning kids, and time for family service projects….”
Or maybe you feel it at your job or in your ministry or with your friends. What you should be doing. What you failed to do. What you said that was wrong. How you fall short. How you could be better.
The pressure of perfection is far too much for our imperfect selves tripping along in an imperfect world.
And that’s the point, sweet friend. It’s not to get everything right. It’s to get what really matters right and doing our best and just laying it all out, as insufficient as it is, as an offering before a gracious God who just wants our heart anyway.
Paul told Timothy: “The whole point of what we’re urging is simply love—love uncontaminated by self-interest and counterfeit faith, a life open to God” (1 Timothy 1, MSG).
Sometimes we have to stop and ask, “What matters here?”
Then we have to choose to receive the grace He offers, deciding it’s okay if we didn’t get it all perfect today and if our life got a little bit messy. Doesn’t God love us? Didn’t we try our best to walk in that love? That’s the point and that’s enough.
To read more devotional thoughts from Heather King, check out her blog here: http://heathercking.wordpress.com/
Copyright © 2008-2015 Heather King
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