Purpose

i want to be someone of whom it can be said,

she makes mistakes well.

and by this i mean that i want to be someone, not who lives life in fear of making mistakes (because this is who i tend towards), but someone who anticipates mistakes, but understands that the way in which i respond to those mistakes is really what will identify my character.

and i think that the proverbs 31 woman can seem perfect, but i bet you that she made plenty of mistakes, but i bet that she made them well. and with humility.
i bet that she had a heart sensitive to the hearts of other people that she also had an awareness of hurts that she had caused.
and i just bet that her response was to acknowledge where her own depravity had allowed her to slip. because she had an understanding that a mistake is not the enemy. failure is not the enemy. broken relationship is.

and where as we don't have the power to control whether or not a mistake might take place, we can control how we maintain our relationships. and what love looks like.

i'm reading this book (thank you erin!) called Loving Our Kids on Purpose by Danny Silk.
i didn't know what to expect. a little cheese maybe? but it is astounding me- the insight and wisdom in the pages of this book.

"So at the heart of godly parenting is the conviction that the mistakes and failures of our children are not the enemy. The real enemy is bondage. And if we don't teach our children how to walk in and handle freedom, they won't know what to do with it. They may stay safe through Christian elementary school and Christian college and then they will go and wrap themselves in a religious environment and say, "Control me from the outside because if any of this went away I think I would disintegrate!" And later they will say, "I married a control freak so I wouldn't fall and we secretly and not so secretly hate eachother. But we go to church." It's a big bummer. To fear our children's poor choices is to teach them to be afraid of freedom."