January 22

Don’t run up debts, except for the huge debt of love you owe each other. When you love others, you complete what the law has been after all along. The law code—don’t sleep with another person’s spouse, don’t take someone’s life, don’t take what isn’t yours, don’t always be wanting what you don’t have, and any other “don’t” you can think of—finally adds up to this: Love other people as well as you do yourself. You can’t go wrong when you love others. When you add up everything in the law code, the sum total is love.  Romans 13:8-10 The Message

A careful read of scripture reveals a narrative of love.  It points us to caring as a higher value than being careful to follow all the rules.  My children are well aware of my limitations.  Today, they find this annoying or amusing or confusing.  But I suspect, even dream of a day when they have their own families to nurture.  I hope one day my children will have children and occasionally call them by the dog’s name.  Or forget to pick them up from the church nursery just once in a long line of remembering to bring all the children home from church.  On that day (of hopefully small and not too consequential forgetfulness), maybe they will say to themselves, “Oh this was bad.  This was very very bad.  I will never do this again…”  Later, perhaps will come, “I remember the time my mom did a similar stupid thing.”

It would be my prayer that this generational forgetting and forgiving of self and others will build an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and mutuality in my family. 

We humans do dumb stuff; there is a way to move beyond it. 

What is that way?  

In The Spirituality of Imperfection, there is this story retold – A man of piety complained to the Baal Shem Tov, saying:  “I have labored hard and long in the service of the Lord, and yet I have received no improvement.  I am still an ordinary and ignorant person.”

The Besht answered:  “You have gained the realization that you are ordinary and ignorant, and this in itself is a worthy accomplishment.”

There is a crack in everything God has made.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It seems absolutely necessary for most of us to get over the idea that man is God.  ~Bill Wilson correspondence

It is a relief to tell the truth about our limitations.  There is little we can confess that others don’t already know about us – we are the ones with the vision problem.

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