GRACE

I love spending time with people and just getting to know where they came from.  Each of us is made very uniquely and our lives hold very different stories.  This past year, I have built relationships with people who are very different than me.  We have shared different ideas about relationships with a significant other, had different views on how to parent our children, different political ideas, different convictions, we are the product different parenting methods, and we even have very different ideas about our purpose on this earth and who is our creator.

Yet one thing is common in all of our lives.  We each have a past.

I had lunch with a sweet friend yesterday and she started sharing some things about her past.  Not unlike my past there were some things there that are just not pretty. As I approach 30, slowly yet surely, I have been thinking about that past.  In the first 30 years of life for me, I have made HUGE decisions that have molded the way I am going to spend the REST of my life.  I survived the high school years without too many enemies, I completed a college degree, I married the person I am going to spend the rest of my life with and we started the family.  Also mixed into the first 30 years of my life, there were things that happened which were not so good and they also will be with me for the rest of my life.

I guess the point is, NONE of us our exempt from our past.  It is who we are today and why we are the way we are today.  We all have our skeletons in the closet and there is so much freedom in being able to say, "Look at all my baggage but look at the person I am right now and the better person I am still striving to be".

This next year, I hope to continue to build relationships with people much different that me.  I want to continue to be tested about why my views of marriage are what they are,  why I see the importance of raising my children the way I do, why I have really strong convictions about some things yet have an attitude of freedom in other things.  I even want to be tested about my spiritual beliefs and why I am a servant of Jesus Christ. I want to have a mind and a heart that are free of judgement and full of love.  I want to teach Layla to have that same kind of heart.  The Jesus kind of heart.  When tested, I hope what they see is a person of love, that is genuine and consistent, and a person they can trust.

The truth is, when you get to the bottom of things, the beauty is in the differences.