Redeemed

I heard a powerful testimony this past weekend, one of healing and forgiveness and overcoming. I love how God can use our most painful experiences, our failures, and mistakes, for His purposes. He redeems them! Today Mia misread her math assignment, quite frankly she assumed she was doing her doubles subtraction work, which is very easy for her. She knows you can just look at the the bottom number and that's the answer. 16-8=8 But, doubles work was yesterday, today the answers needed a different approach. Mia is a hard worker, she gets 100% almost every time, and she takes pride in that. Today, she got most problems wrong. This was devastating. Suddenly, she hated math, she hated school, she did not want to redo the work, she was a bucket of tears and frustration. Once again, the theme of redemption popped into my mind. I always circle the incorrect answers and put stars on the right ones. As the kids correct each mistake, I turn the circles into a smiley face or a puppy depending on my mood. This makes it fun for the kids, they get a secondary "reward" even if they didn't get the first star, and helps clarify which ones have been made right. Today though, I needed to go above and beyond to show her what can happen with old mistakes that are redeemed. Today's marks of error, signs of her mistake, were turned into beautiful princesses complete with starry wands. I cried through the whole thing. What a gift the Holy Spirit prompted me to give her. She was thrilled with the result and I was able to tell her, through my tears, that no matter what happens in her life she can always go to her Heavenly Father for redemption and he will make something beautiful from it.

You always have choices. You can crumple in defeat, and quit when you make mistakes or are hurt. You can hide and pretend they didn't happen. You can lash out and hurt other people, leaving a trail of further devastation behind you. Or you can allow God to change you, redeem you, and use those things for beautiful purposes that He has planned in advance for you.

Lord, my paper of a life is filled with lots of circles. Even the few stars I have are mostly just luck! But I turn myself into you for correction and healing. Make my mistakes, failures, and hurts something beautiful! AMEN!