God Lets Us Bump Our Head

Olivia slammed her fingers in a drawer today while 'helping' me put away Daddy's socks. She stood there with her fingers stuck, and those huge tears just flowed down her cheeks while she screamed. Of course I quickly removed her fingers and cuddled her, wiping away her tears and kissing the fingers to make them all better. My main thought was; "Well, hopefully she learned her lesson and it won't happen again!"

This is often my thought when my kids hurt themselves. Surprisingly, I've found myself to be the kind of Mom who lets things happen to them instead of trying to shelter them. We let Samuel bump his head on everything when he was learning to crawl. I mean, I keep an eye on the kids and we do our best to prevent major, emergency-room visit-type accidents from happening, but most of the time we let the bumps, bruises, and scrapes happen.

Do we like those things? Absolutely not! But we realize that while the kiddos would be safer in the crib, you can't leave them wrapped in blankets in the crib for their entire childhood. You gotta let them out sometime....and we realized that the more we let them get those bumps and bruises, the quicker they learn their lessons. Within a couple of days of bumping his head on the table, our little crawling Samuel learned to avoid all sharp edges of furniture and never bumped his head again.

And today Olivia, within 2 minutes of sobbing over the painful fingers, walked back to that mean old dresser drawer. I watched as she carefully opened the drawer and slammed it shut. And again, and again. Until she satisfied that inner need she must have had, to "defeat" that drawer. Basically she learned how to shut the drawer without slamming her fingers in it, and she was obviously thrilled to show it a thing or two. I was thrilled to see her determination and satisfaction!

It made me think, though, about our Heavenly Father. How many times does He allow us to fall and bump our heads, scrape our spirits, and even feel like we've drawn blood emotionally while we make mistakes? He is omnipotent and omniscient, and you'd think He loves us so much that He would kindly protect us from getting hurt. But oh no.....He loves us so much that He lets us mess up. Besides the fact that He made us with free will so, much like these rambunctious little kiddos who run around bumping their heads in our homes, we run around in our little lives and manage to collect our share of "oops" and "owies".

Wow, you may think sometimes....How can God let me make this mistake? Simple; He hopes we learn from our problems and next time, refrain from repeating the mistake again. He wants to see us quit bumping our heads but instead of holding us back, He lets us go....right into the edge of things. He is always there to comfort us; holding us close and soothing the owie away. But then He lets go, and hopefully this time, He watches us confront our past mistakes and like Olivia successfully shutting the drawer, the next time we move past our prior problem without messing up again.

He is so full of grace, that even if we keep stumbling over the same issue, He keeps loving us and encouraging us to keep going.

So maybe I'm being a better Mom than I realize sometimes, by letting my kids get bruised. I am watching them learn from them. And God is watching you and I get bruised....He loves us so much that He has faith in us, that we'll learn from our mistakes.