Grace-Filled Stepparenting by Laurie Polich Short

Author:Laurie Polich Short
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780736982368
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers
Published: 2021-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

6

When Unfair Is Okay

When I was getting a master’s degree at Fuller Seminary, my ethics professor left such a vivid impression on me that I can still picture him. His name was Lewis Smedes, and he would whisk into class like Jimmy Stewart, with white hair tumbling down his forehead and childlike curiosity on his eighty-year-old face. He would begin every class with a question—usually about what was right or wrong in some complex issue. If you raised your hand to comment, he would savor your words as if they were the most important thoughts in the world at that moment. After a pause, he would cock his head and smile and counter with another question. Nothing was ever fully resolved, but a great deal of learning occurred.

In the end I was left with an appreciation of the complexity of right and wrong. Any stance on any issue must take so many other viewpoints into consideration! But there was one response that created a variable in all conclusions, and when this powerful posture entered the equation, it turned dead ends into new beginnings. Dr. Smedes eventually devoted a book to this transforming truth, and the title of his bestselling book alone is powerful enough to make sense of this chapter.

In Forgive and Forget, Dr. Smedes summed up the posture of forgiveness with these words: “Our sense of fairness tells us people should pay for the wrong they do. But forgiving is love’s power to break nature’s rules.”1

With these words, I begin this chapter with a disclaimer. Without some kind of faith in God, much of what is in this chapter could be tough to swallow and may make no sense. However, in a book called Grace-Filled Stepparenting, this chapter may be the most important one in the book. Assuming you have already made your way through my faith bias at this point, you are either on the same page or adept at bypassing. You may need to bypass this chapter altogether unless you are open to the miracles that can happen inside our hearts. As chapter 5 made clear, a stepparent’s job can feel thankless and could lead to deep resentment. But another response is available to us, and while it may feel incongruous to circumstances that are clearly unfair, it is the only one capable of setting us free. I invite you to go back and breathe in Dr. Smedes’s words in the preceding paragraph one more time as we begin a stepparent’s journey toward forgiveness and grace.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.