What is Hard?

There has been an awful lot of talk at my house the past few months about things being HARD. Just to take you behind the scenes, I will tell you that my husband and I have both adopted a new eating lifestyle to become healthier since we are getting older. Seeing friends our age go home before their time as made a deep impact. However, the sugar cravings have been HARD to ignore.

Further down the hallway, you will find my daughter who is now 12, with a frustrated look that seems permanently attached to her round face as she stares at that bleeping math book that has been the thorn in her flesh since September. "This is too HARD," she screams, as she gives into defeat and decides to hide her assignments, hoping I won't discover she has given up.

In the next bedroom over there is little sis wiping her tears as she comes in from dance class thinking a mistake has been made as she was recommended for an early promotion to move up to the next class. Her thoughts are she is too small and the class is too HARD.

Things are hard in life. Hard to accomplish, hard to understand, hard to believe, hard to accept, hard to let go, hard to ignore ..just HARD!

Yet as He always does, God was showing me a theme, this time in my own house. "What do all these things have in common?" He asked. No, it is not that these stories are people from one family and share the same last name. If you look more closely, you will see all these expectations are being attempted without a key ingredient and a key player at that. Any guesses? Yup, our heavenly Father is missing with His magical touch of GRACE.

Skipping back to the diet change, that change will require grace because I cannot attain my goal on my own. I can be disciplined and go jogging for enhanced results in loosing weight, but for transformation in adopting a new lifestyle, I will need to show myself grace and not freak out if I ate a cheeseburger one day. Kiddo #1 will have to be disciplined to start her day earlier since math takes her longer to finish. She will ALSO need GRACE from me not to freak out when she misses the same thing AGAIN to help her try again so she can get it.

Another example that comes to mind and I can say with all honesty that I am finally seeing results and transformation in my heart is thinking good thoughts about people that have hurt me. For years I have tried to forgive people in my own ability and it just wasn't happening. I couldn't understand why I couldn't. I wanted to! I prayed to! I tried to! It was HARD! It became EASIER when I decided to focus on my discipline to read my Bible instead and let God change my heart, dig out more of the yuck and become planted in His grace. Grace was the key. It was the noun, verb, the subject, the predicate, the point! It is the vehicle which transports me from the place where I am to where God wants me to live.


Paul said in 2 Corinthians 12:9, "And the Lord said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.' Yup, that missing piece, that missing ingredient in my parenting, and in my house was grace towards one another and especially ourselves.

As for my own school days, I was a horrible student myself. I had the luxury of being in Mrs. Schultz's chemistry class twice. Sometimes I would even do better on a test the first time than I had the second in Mrs. Kestle's Algebra class. But you know the funny thing is, teaching GRACE has been the most challenging subject of them all to teach my kids. I can't give away something I don't have. I can't teach something if I don't at the least understand the foundations of it and grow from there. It's the one class I have to be the student and the teacher at the same time. Thankfully I know enough to present it to them, but God seems okay that we are learning more about it together. What is hard you ask? Anything without the Lord's help, anything without his grace.

Sitting at the Master's Feet,
~Clarissa