Kindergarten Logic

What if we were willing to extend grace to others like God so willingly extends it to us?

There’s a clinic in the office in the school where I work. There’s a little boy that comes in a couple of times a day for medical reasons. When he comes in in the morning, he often asks me to walk him to activity. I will find out where he needs to go and we walk and chat.

Sometimes it’s just down the hall and sometimes it’s all the way at the gym. When it’s at the gym, I will tell him that there aren’t many people I would walk outside for in the freezing cold. He always just grins.

A couple of days ago, I was walking with him and he spotted his class coming up the sidewalk. As soon as he saw them, he told me I could go.

I chuckled all the way back to the office. I had been dismissed by a six-year-old.

I thought about that precious child even after I got home. I thought about how special he was to me and how I enjoy walking with him. I also thought about how it would never occur to me to get my feelings hurt by his dismissal. He didn’t mean anything by it. He had found his class. He no longer required my assistance.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all live with the clarity of kindergarten logic?

It really made me think about other situations where I may have gotten my feelings hurt by someone who had no intention of hurting them. I really don’t believe for the most part, that people go out of their way to hurt each other. I think for whatever reason, they are focused on themselves at the moment instead of the other person.

I think oftentimes we can either choose to have our feelings hurt or choose to believe that someone’s words or actions really aren’t about us, but about them.

There are certainly times where someone does go out of their way to hurt us and that’s not okay, but I’m not thinking about those times. I’m thinking about a careless word or comment that we can allow to snowball into a giant boulder, when we could have chose to simply overlook it.

As parents, we do that for our children all of the time. There’s a certain amount of grace required to be a parent. But, what if we were willing to extend that grace to others? What would our lives look like if we were willing to let the unintentional stuff go?

What would our relationships look like? What would our workplaces look like? What would our churches look like?

Maybe living in peace and not in constant turmoil, is a conscious choice that we must make daily. I think it’s probably worth it.

A kindergartner reminded me. Perhaps you needed reminding too.

Have an awesome day!

Wendy 🙂