Proverbs 4:25 (AMP)
“Let your eyes look directly ahead and let your gaze be fixed straight in front of you.”
Sometimes it’s us. Sometimes, maybe sometimes, we are the ones stopping ourselves from moving forward. I’ve been taking a deeper and more honest look lately. I love how this verse says, ‘let your eyes look directly ahead.’ Yea, I’m pretty sure my eyes look all over the flipping place. Whether it’s looking at the negative instead of positive, looking at the ‘good enough’s’ from society around us, looking way behind at the never ending list of ‘what was I thinking.’ But what’s right in front of us, what happens when we look directly ahead, it’s called hope. It’s called a future where we get to decide what it looks like while keeping our eyes up above. When we are looking all around, we have a tendency to just keep doing the same thing over and over, thinking maybe it will work this time, or fix it this time, or make it go away this time. Dude, we’ve gotta stop that crazy.
A few years back one of our kiddos had a real anger issue. Straight up mean. Made me cry mean. On top of this, I understood where he was coming from. He bottles things and then explodes. He also is my mini me and before I was diagnosed correctly and found the right meds, he saw some real scary stuff come from me. I had moments that I turned into a monster and they experienced it so many times so he’d give it back. He didn’t know any better. It’s what he saw. We would do everything to discipline it out of him. Send him to his room, big, stern, LOUD talks with him, (if you know what I mean), take things away. Finally one day it was bad, we took him by the shirt and dragged him to his room, he got up and was like ‘What?!’ He could have cared less. All the sudden I was like, we’ve gotta come at this with a totally different angle. We just keep doing the same thing and it’s not working. I started telling him how amazing he was, how his heart is so caring, how when he acts like that it really hurts my heart cause I know it’s not who he is. I told him, I know there’s more pain inside of you then anger. That’s when things started to change. He bawled one day saying, ‘I don’t know why I’m like this and I want to change.’ And he did, and we helped him.
I say all of this because it is so so true in our own lives. Friends, we can’t keep getting in our own way and doing the same things over and over again. It’s not working. Sometimes change has to happen whether we want to come out of our comfort or not. In that though, we’ve gotta be gentle, filled with grace, and compassionate with ourselves in order to turn the corner. Like with my son, we’ve gotta get to that place where we want to get off the crazy train. As parents, we saw that what we were doing wasn’t working, we had to change our approach. You know where I’m going with this. Sometimes I think Jesus is up there like, any day now Heather. Just shift a few gears and you’ve got this. I’m hearing ya now Lord! Loud and clear! 🙂
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
Wounded to Warrior 