Sibling Relations: Walking Humbly with God

He has told you, O man, what is good;

and what does the LORD require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with our God.

Micah 6:8

Yesterday was a good day, but a long day filled with what I endearingly refer to as jumping hurdles. Those hurdles are sometimes the normal challenges of parenting multiple children (you know - teaching, training, correcting, laundry, cooking, cleaning, teaching, correcting, training, more cooking, groceries, more laundry, more correcting, more cooking - you get the picture). Other times those hurdles are much, much larger and often they include the issues of our children's past hurts and the present, maladaptive behaviors created by those hurts.

After successfully surviving a day full of hurdles, I found myself beside the bedside of one of my precious ones that I had corrected multiple times that day for her merciless pursuit of justice and lack of patience with her siblings. In other words, her critical spirit. My prayer for her was so clear as it poured from my heart, that God would help her to do justice and love kindness. I quickly realized that human nature often falls on one side of this spectrum - either the justice side or the mercy side - while lacking in the other. When you pursue only justice without mercy, your life and faith become legalistic and you miss the point of the gospel. When you pursue mercy without justice, you have yet another aberration of the gospel that claims grace for every act and avoids the true gospel message to die to sin. (Romans 6) It is only when we walk humbly with God in complete dependence on Him that we are able to do justice and love kindness.

And so it was that my prayer for this sweet child, and each of our children, began to change and I prayed that they would learn to depend on God in humility and to walk daily with Him, living justly, loving kindly.