"All That I Have is Yours"

It's funny you spend most of your kids lives (at least while they live with us!) trying to teach them more than just "don't do that" or "say please."  You want to instill in them to be a person of virtue, extending grace and love to people, looking for opportunity to make a difference.  That is, until someone does them wrong and then those long mama bear claws come out like a vampire's teeth during a full moon.  Grace and patience get thrown out the door quicker than a sneeze escapes from my nose!  Such was the case when my daughter and I realized that a good friend of hers had stolen a couple of shirts from her closet thanks to social media.  My first reaction was to confront her and then distance yourself.  Realize that someone who steals has issues and we don't want any "issues" in our house (not that we are free from them)!   The confrontation didn't go so well as there were denials and explanations that the shirts belonged to another friend and they just happened to look like the ones missing from my daughter's closet.  It gave me more of a platform to show my daughter that now more than ever it was time to distance yourself and not associate with someone who continues to live in lies.  I wiped my hands clean of that relationship although what I had not noticed was my daughter didn't wash her hands, nor did she wash her heart as it as full of grace, compassion and concern that went beyond the material she had lost.

After a couple of weeks, my daughter and I were talking and not realizing she was setting me up she asked me if I remembered the part of the story in Les Miserables that had to do when the police brought Jean Valjean back to the Bishop with his bag full of silver utensils that he had stolen from the Bishop's house.  Of course, I remember that, we actually have it on a CD as a radio theater play that our family enjoyed listening to during long road trips.  I could almost repeat the scene line by line.  My daughter said, what was the response of the priest to the Jean Valjean?   "All that I have is yours."   My daughter went on to say, "it's the way that I feel about my friend."  "What's not important are things, like shirts.  But what is important is my friend and she must be struggling to do this and I want her to know that I'm not concerned about those stupid shirts, but I am concerned about her and all that I have is hers...."

And so, grace was extended, forgiven granted, a relationship restored, and even more important love poured out upon a hurting soul.  A soul that needed mercy and not judgement.   It was all right there in front of me but my claws got in the way.  I am so glad that my daughter didn't listen in this situation to me but rather practiced the grace that had been extended to her by her heavenly Father.  Isn't that what He says to us, "All that I have is yours."