Crippling compassion and shameless favor, despite your testy adolescent habits and boundary challenges; your mother may have encouraged rebellious character traits. There’s the hovering and nurturing instincts that possibly subdue the free-range thinking and aspirations of, would-be, ambitious children. The mother hen only acknowledges independence as a temporary state. She was wired for protection against premature flight from the nest and she instinctively constructs a shield around her offspring that sometimes becomes a barrier. Her vicarious interventions outlining and lobbying for the path without pain or consequences. Blame your mother for your lack of depth and thin-skinned nature when the weight of worldly criticism rises against your ego-driven selfishness. Blame your mother when the world pushes the reject button in opposition to the lofty self assessment facade you’ve built around your collection of near successes. Blame your mother because she was always in your corner and always on your side, but don’t forget to blame your mother for praying through sleepless nights and sacrificed meals, for taking a step back in order to push you forward, for enduring stress and frustrations, for teaching and re-teaching you acceptable behavior for every situation. Go ahead, you can blame your mother for that!
In the insulting coldness of direct criticism, he’s everything you needed to know, packaged in a dirty, greasy brown paper bag, saturated with the smell of sweat and cigar smoke. The anti-finesse sprayed into your ear through a fire nozzle at high pressure with constant repetitions of warnings about consequences. Your father barricades himself inside a visible kingdom of off-limits temptations and crushes your spirits from afar with denials and conditions. Blame your father when you’re face-to-face with the challenges he warned you about; when you’re trembling in fear to remember the solutions you ignored. Blame him because you were driven by self-pity to defy the wisdom of his insensitive protection techniques. Blame your father for your deafness to repetition and inarticulate deliveries. Blame him because he allowed you to be punched in the face by reality so that you wouldn’t be slain by real life. It’s probably his fault that you couldn’t recognize the shield he built around your world that only defiance could have destroyed but be sure to blame him for the fourteen-hour days he worked to finance your life and dreams. Blame him for secretly funding your foolish adventures and for suffering through the personal moments of having to administer discipline when he just wanted to put his arms around you. Yeah, you can blame him for all of that!
Ultimately you can blame God for the flawed parents He sent you or you can blame Him for taking the ones you had. Blame Him because the Word He designed to be written in your heart, couldn’t get through the mental maze of yield and stop signs in your head. Blame God because the thing that happened to you wasn’t supposed to happen to anyone; especially not innocent ones.While you’re blaming Him remember that God pulls burnished gold nuggets from the dusty wreckages of human life. He is agonizing over our defiance while He waits for the weight of our burdens to force us back to Him. We have to need Him in order to get to know Him. If you’re already too good or too strong or too pure, you don’t need God anyway! Stop complaining and save yourself from those inexplicable personal pains that only you know about.
As far as you know, God stood by and watched while you were harassed and abused and abandoned because you didn’t hear from Him. He was silent while your family suffered and while you lost those closest to you. While the unmerciful rain continued to fall upon your misery-soaked heart God never said a word. Or could it be that you just didn’t hear Him?
The pre-rehearsed explanation that describes the details of immobilizing sorrow, understandable anger and legitimate fear is the excuse that clings to the lock on the vault door that leads to your (my/our) freedom. Excuses are only confessions of our shortcomings God brings to our attention so that we can reflect upon them, acknowledge them, release them and never be entangled by them again. But as long as we give them the power to repeatedly disguise themselves as acceptable responses to our personal pains and injustices we will be trapped outside the fortress of His protective will.
“Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” John 8:34 (NKJV)
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