Amazed and Ashamed
I heard a story tonight that I thought was very powerful.
A little boy had done something wrong and would not admit to his mother that he did it. The mother confronted the boy and realizing that the mother knew what he had done, he ran upstairs and hid. The mother let him go hide and called the father at work to let him know what had happened. When the father came home, the mother told him that she hadn’t heard a sound from the little boy for the past couple of hours. The father went upstairs and looked in the little boy’s room but he wasn’t there. The boy wasn’t in his brother’s room or the bathroom either which just left one room. The father went into his own room and saw a lump underneath the covers on his bed. He went over and lifted the covers off the boy. The boy was soaking wet with sweat from being under those covers for a couple of hours and was lying there motionless trying to decide whether to pull the covers back over himself or lie there totally exposed. The father broke the silence by saying these words: “There is nothing you can do that would ever make me love you less”. The little boy sat up and buried himself in his father’s arms and chest and wept because he was so sorry for what he did.
Those words: “there is nothing you can do that would ever make me love you less”, those words are so powerful! Imagine if those words were the first words out of a parents mouth when their children did something wrong and the children knew that their parents truly meant it. How different would parent and child relationships be? If a human parent can say something like that and truly mean it, how much more powerful and perfect is it when the Creator of the Universe and your Heavenly Father says it! That is just mind boggling to me!
It absolutely does not matter what you have done, God still loves you so incredibly much. It’s not a conditional love and does not require anything in return; it’s totally unconditional, so much so that He let His only Son die to prove that to you!
I was talking with a friend today at school and she was telling me about a near death car accident she was in on the weekend. A lady actually died in that accident but thankfully my friend and her boyfriend were ok! That got me thinking, what if she had died? I am not the type of person that goes and shares the gospel message the first time I meet someone. I like to get to know a person, and let them see me and how I live my life and hopefully that will be a good example. Then when the time is right I will slowly bring up the subject of God. That is how I have been living my life but maybe I need to step it up a notch! I haven’t had the opportunity to talk to this girl about God or about my relationship with Him. She could have died and I never once told her about Jesus. I am ashamed. I feel horrible. Now I can go on the defensive saying that I see this girl only once a week for a couple of hours and those hours are spent listening to professors speak or running between classes so we don’t really have the time to chat. How many other people in my life should I be sharing more about Jesus instead of letting them just see the way I live my life. That is something that I really have to work on because if by some chance her boyfriend didn’t swerve in time and she didn’t make it to class today…I could have planted a seed in her life already but I didn’t. My mission is to both show Jesus in my life by example as well as sharing the love I have in my heart for Him through conversations – which I know is not going to be easy for me. Then again, who said making a difference the world was going to be an easy task – I didn’t sign up for easy!
A little boy had done something wrong and would not admit to his mother that he did it. The mother confronted the boy and realizing that the mother knew what he had done, he ran upstairs and hid. The mother let him go hide and called the father at work to let him know what had happened. When the father came home, the mother told him that she hadn’t heard a sound from the little boy for the past couple of hours. The father went upstairs and looked in the little boy’s room but he wasn’t there. The boy wasn’t in his brother’s room or the bathroom either which just left one room. The father went into his own room and saw a lump underneath the covers on his bed. He went over and lifted the covers off the boy. The boy was soaking wet with sweat from being under those covers for a couple of hours and was lying there motionless trying to decide whether to pull the covers back over himself or lie there totally exposed. The father broke the silence by saying these words: “There is nothing you can do that would ever make me love you less”. The little boy sat up and buried himself in his father’s arms and chest and wept because he was so sorry for what he did.
Those words: “there is nothing you can do that would ever make me love you less”, those words are so powerful! Imagine if those words were the first words out of a parents mouth when their children did something wrong and the children knew that their parents truly meant it. How different would parent and child relationships be? If a human parent can say something like that and truly mean it, how much more powerful and perfect is it when the Creator of the Universe and your Heavenly Father says it! That is just mind boggling to me!
It absolutely does not matter what you have done, God still loves you so incredibly much. It’s not a conditional love and does not require anything in return; it’s totally unconditional, so much so that He let His only Son die to prove that to you!
I was talking with a friend today at school and she was telling me about a near death car accident she was in on the weekend. A lady actually died in that accident but thankfully my friend and her boyfriend were ok! That got me thinking, what if she had died? I am not the type of person that goes and shares the gospel message the first time I meet someone. I like to get to know a person, and let them see me and how I live my life and hopefully that will be a good example. Then when the time is right I will slowly bring up the subject of God. That is how I have been living my life but maybe I need to step it up a notch! I haven’t had the opportunity to talk to this girl about God or about my relationship with Him. She could have died and I never once told her about Jesus. I am ashamed. I feel horrible. Now I can go on the defensive saying that I see this girl only once a week for a couple of hours and those hours are spent listening to professors speak or running between classes so we don’t really have the time to chat. How many other people in my life should I be sharing more about Jesus instead of letting them just see the way I live my life. That is something that I really have to work on because if by some chance her boyfriend didn’t swerve in time and she didn’t make it to class today…I could have planted a seed in her life already but I didn’t. My mission is to both show Jesus in my life by example as well as sharing the love I have in my heart for Him through conversations – which I know is not going to be easy for me. Then again, who said making a difference the world was going to be an easy task – I didn’t sign up for easy!
posted by Ashlee @ 1:04 AM
1 Comments:
At 12:29 PM,
Ryan deWeerd said…
Great post, Ashlee. Very encouraging and heartfelt! Amen! We certainly need to be ready always to share Christ with whomever we meet. I think if we could really see people as God sees them, we would not let so many opportunities slip by... I know I do far too often, but I pray that more and more there would be a fire in our bones that we could not keep in.
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