Snippets and Snatches

A few days ago I wrote about the mother being investigated for drowning her two boys.  We have since learned that she confessed to suffocating them first then burying them in a watery grave in their carseats.  My heart aches for these babies and the family and community grieving their loss – today, pictures of the funeral were on the Post & Courier’s website.  I cried and couldn’t help pleading for mercy for this community, these precious babies, the family, and yes, even the mom.  In all my years of counseling and in my personal life, I have learned that sometimes hurting people hurt people.  Sometimes we don’t get second chances or opportunities to make amends for the pain we have caused.  Sometimes we do!  This I know, whether you have been the “perpetrator” of pain, causing harm to another; or, the ”victim” of pain, being the recipient of someone’s harm, we CAN heal with the restoration that only comes with forgiveness, compassion, and mercy.  We “all fall short of the glory of God” and, hard as we try, we may still stumble and fall.  I have come to know the redeeming forgiveness of Christ more fully when I have either needed forgiveness myself or have been challenged to offer it to another suffering soul, one often proclaimed to be completely undeserving and ”beyond saving.”   Let’s recall Paul’s life of persecuting believers prior to his own remarkable conversion.   If there is hope for him, there is hope for us all!  “What is impossible with men is possible with God.”  By nature of our fallible, blind, and hurting humanity, we are each capable of finding ourselves in a pit and clamoring for God’s mercy.  Beware of pedastols, either imagined or put upon us by others, they are the shakable, toothpick towers from which we are capable of a long, hard, humbling fall to rock bottom, where even then our merciful, loving Father awaits and says, ”Lo, I am with you ALWAYS.”  There’s so much in the world we can’t understand, so many reasons to shout ”WHY?”  Yet I can’t help but fall into the arms of Jesus and say “Lord, please save this mom!  But for your grace, there go I.  Lord, I am lost too!”   The Jesus Prayer simply says it all: ”Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”