This morning was a tough one, and it’s really been all my fault.
My family and I went to Baltimore this weekend so I could attend Expo East Natural Products Expo. In service of making life easy, my husband and I agreed to bring the kids without supplements and treatments, just for 2 days, and forego our Paleo diet. It would be too inconvenient to pack everything and we were too rushed to do proper due diligence on the food.
You see, after 6 years on this or that extreme diet, with hiccups here and there, I’d have thought that by NOW something should be fixed nutritionally. I feel like we’ve tried everything but food is still a huge struggle for her.
This week, we’re suffering the ramifications of those poor food choices. More precisely, my daughter is. Last night, she barely even slept. And this morning? It was all we could do to get her out the door rather than running back into bed. We’re not sure we should have sent her in at all.
My personal frustration, though, is with myself. As a Christian, I know I need to respect God’s ways and God’s will.
And most of the time, I’m pretty aware that Gina’s Way & Will often is an utter failure, so it’s not that hard.
But when it comes to my kids…
I’ve been praying and anxious, and dying to see some improvement in my kids but I have only seen things get worse – and long past the time that “detox” symptoms should have died down.
This struck this week on the way to Bible study. I was halfway through the drive when I started crying, selfishly, about why God wasn’t fixing this.
And I put it to Him flat out: “God why aren’t you healing them???!!” Then I flat out started crying (at a stop light, thankfully).
I know, I know this sounds disrespectful and distrustful, but the truth is this question had been harboring in my heart for a long time. Because I knew it indicated a lack of trust, I pushed it aside and pushed it down, not wanting to admit it.
But not admitting it didn’t mean I didn’t FEEL it, and I was so intent and focused on keeping up my respect for the Lord that I forgot to just be truthful with Him. I forgot that even though it was a sin to distrust Him, the bigger sin was not telling Him. (And I mean telling, not confessing – that came later.)
After the tears and the light turning green, I suddenly felt much better, as if a heavy weight had been lifted up off my shoulders. All these months, I’d been trying to figure out to “give” my pain to God, while the whole time I was holding back my feelings from Him and imposing a kind of religious legalism on myself.
Meanwhile, yesterday we spoke with our biomed doctor and after listing a few gains, he told us the kids were actually doing very well – and they are. They were just not gaining the areas I was looking.
Sometimes, we can be really far-sighted when we’re trying to help our children. So I’m going to share with you the two big things that happened this week:
- Zoe was a mess, true, but know what? She bounced back by Wednesday. Previously, if she had gotten behaviorally off track, it would takes WEEKS to get her on point again. Same was true with the beginning of the school year – only 1 day to totally reduce transitions times by a huge margin, and only a few more to eliminate that time altogether. We just had a tiny bit of a reboot on this week. In fact, she has NEVER bounced back this quickly.
- During prayer time this week, Amelia told me she was confused. Ok, I know that sounds like no biggie for a 14 year old, but you have to remember she has significant speech disability/regression. Previously, she has only told me easy feelings: “happy,” “sad,” “scared.” She communicated to me that she was confused about praying, or possibly who Jesus was, so we discussed it for a little while until I believe she understood. (She actually is smarter than people give her credit for in terms of understanding more advanced concepts.) That’s HUGE!
I didn’t discover either of these things until AFTER my break down.
Today, I’m not going to give you a list of 5 things or any of that stuff. All I’m going to say is that if you want to tell God something, no matter what it is, just say it. He can handle and you need to admit it.
Later, of course, I apologized for my lack of trust. That said, the act of building trust in the Lord is like a tall ladder. Every rung gets you closer to His heart, but there are always more rungs ahead, even if you didn’t see them at first.
I’m grateful for these little steps and I’m grateful that I have a loving God who adores my kids.
