My Parents and Grandparents this last Christmas

Ever had one of those weeks that appears to have a “theme?”  I believe God speaks to us all the time.  Sometimes He does it by bopping us on the head, or whispering quietly in our ear, or sometimes He brings things into our lives again and again until (if we’re paying attention), we see a pattern.  I’ve had a week that seems to have me feeling like a broken record…then it hit me…there’s a theme here.  God is speaking.  How cool…

We’ve been discussing manners at our house.  It seems to me that many times, as parents, we keep manners in a box.  We limit them to saying “please,” or “thank you,” or not blowing our nose at the dinner table.  But having “good manners” should go deeper than that.  I find myself saying things that my parents and grandparents used to say to me.  The other day, as Mattie and I were leaving my work, I said to her, “Did you pick up the kid’s area?”  She answered that she had, and then I said, “Be sure to leave it better than you found it.”  I didn’t even think before saying it.  It was a concept that was drilled into me by my parents, but I learned it most from my grandparents.  When I was a kid my grandpa was a rural letter carrier.  Every year my grandpa and grandma took us to the state rural letter carriers convention with them.  I remember getting up in the morning and making my bed at the hotel (something I didn’t always do at home) because Grandpa would say, “We always leave a place better than we found it.”  When he taught me this, he was telling me that the housekeeper had worth and we needed to treat her with love and respect—even if we never met her, even if she never knew why we were doing it.  Powerful message, and even though I don’t make my bed at home every day, I always think of that when I stay at someone’s house or at a hotel.

But, there’s more to this theme than one comment.   Our daughter Mattie and I have been having deeper conversations than that.  We had the State Fair last week.  It’s a busy week for us because Mattie has many projects there—her biggest being her rabbits.  So, this year, we invited her cousin to spend the weekend with us.  Mattie and Emma are great friends and they had a good time—although they did get on each other’s nerves at points.  Mattie was challenging me on one of those points while we were riding in the car this last week.  She didn’t understand why I seemed to favor Emma’s ideas over hers.  It was an honest emotion, and I understood why she was frustrated.  I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t that I thought Emma had better ideas, it was because Emma was our guest, and that I was being hospitable.  That concept was difficult for a ten year old–who desires her mother’s approval and felt that my choosing her cousin’s ideas over hers was a sign that I didn’t approve of her– to grasp.  So I turned the tables on her.  It gave me a base to deepen the discussion to one of how she acts when she’s a guest.  Does she behave well knowing that people are trying to be hospitable to her?  Is she putting others before herself?  (She’s always been naturally gracious, so this isn’t a problem, but it was a great conversation.)

God, then deepened the theme that was becoming very transparent, when I read this article that was posted on facebook.  (http://www.prodigalmagazine.com/she-yelled-and-called-me-names/)  It tells the story of a lady who is getting a coffee at Starbucks and is treated very poorly by someone else while in the drive-thru.  But, instead of returning evil for evil, she chooses to try to buy the other lady’s coffee.  One quote that blew me away was this, “Instead of getting mad or yelling back at her, a sense of empathy invaded me. I looked at her again, and this time I saw someone different, someone who wrenched my heart. Her eyes were red and puffy. Her hair was pulled back in a natty ponytail. She held her phone in her palm, glancing down at it every few seconds. And she was driving that big ole’ gas hog of a Suburban, my own car of choice when I had three kids at home and a carpool.”  I don’t know that empathy would have been my first reaction to the lady in question.  If you have a chance to read the article, you’ll see that this woman didn’t deserve empathy at all.  But then I thought of how many times I’ve asked God to “open my eyes and help me to see people as You see them.”  I was convicted.

How many times do I not treat people with empathy?  Whether it be the Fed-Ex guy who is driving me crazy, the woman who pulled out in front of me in the grocery store parking lot, or the person who has sinned against me, how does God want me to react?