Otherwise known as: we all sin.  Don’t we?

My dad has a great philosophy about judgment.  He says that judgment is any time a person looks at another person’s choices and says “if I were given the same set of circumstances, I’d do better.”  It’s easy to judge in that kind of way when you know you’d never have the same sort of circumstances.  Actually, it’s easy even when you’ve got the same set of circumstances and you make the same bad choices.  I can’t count the amount of times that I, as a mother of toddlers, have winced when I witness a mom going through a store ignoring her child’s tantrum when I myself have been that mother a week before.  When given the choice between leaving (and not getting the groceries I need to make that night’s meal) or taking my child into the bathroom to calm down (knowing that they will just start screaming for cookies again) or just ignoring the behavior and hoping that at some point they wise up to the fact that it’s not effective, I choose option C.  Not because I’m a bad mother, but because of the fact that at some point I had to accept the fact that no matter how well I do my job, my kids are still free to make their own bad choices.  And sometimes kids behave badly.

Don’t we all?  I may not be two anymore, but there are still times where I figuratively see the cookies, know there’s not the money for the cookies, still want the cookies, and have to whine “but I wanted COOKIES” all the way home.  Truthfully in my case it’s usually not really cookies but the strawberries and blueberries I want to plant, or the new clothes I could really use, or the extravagant meal I want to cook, or just the success that other people seem to have that I crave no matter how successful I am in my own ventures.  Let’s be honest, dear readers:  no matter how much older we get, in some ways we never grow.  I look at my daughter looking at the other child screaming in the cart, I see the glint in her eyes and I know what she’s going to say.  “Mom,” she says, “why can’t he just stop screaming?  He’s loud.  It’s rude.”  I have to keep my smirk to myself as I quietly remind her that last week she was the loud child, and sometimes when we’re tired and hungry we make poor choices.

And then I go to church the next Sunday, and I think about all the times I’ve seen people ready to throw some poor soul out because of the bad choices they’ve made, and I wonder when we’ll all learn.  We’ve all thrown tantrums.  We’ve all disobeyed out of selfishness and silly motivations.  We’ve all had our moments where we didn’t care that we were sinning because we felt it was our right, or it would hurt too hard to quit. We all want sympathy for our own failings, grace and compassion, understanding and temperance.  But when it comes to the failings of others we’re all too quick to stamp “failure” on their foreheads and send them away.

There if not for the grace of God, right?

I think we hear that saying and we miss the real meaning.  We look at it as proof of God’s devotion to ourselves, because we’re the ones that got the grace.  But that’s not the point.  We need to fully realize our own responsibility to pay out the grace we’ve been given, to live it out in full.  Grace offered is grace lost if we don’t give it away.

So don’t keep it for yourself.