As I get older I recognize and uncover so many frustrations and struggles I have with my parents. I love them and I know they love me, but one of the biggest hindrances has been being who God created me to be and not who my parents think I am or should be. There is a huge gap in this. I don't think they are necessarily disappointed in who I am; I just don't think they realize who I am. Not completely anyway.
For example. I hear over and over again from my family that they are so happy I want to remain single, never have kids and serve the Lord. I literally have no idea where they got that. I look forward to being married one day. I look forward to having chubby, curly-headed toddlers who grow into amazing men and women of God. Just because I'm not out pursuing it like society tells us to and my identity and focus are not based on marriage and a family, doesn't mean I don't long for it.
It's so easy to focus on the brokenness in our relationships, however. A friend of mine illuminated my thinking with a similar issue with her mother. "She is hurt because she thinks if I am not like her then I am insinuating she wasn't a good enough mother or that she failed somehow. I think she was a wonderful mother; I'm just not her."
It was an "a-ha" moment if ever there was. Maybe while my parents are proud of me, every time I step out and break the mold they are thinking, "Why doesn't she want to do it our way? Weren't we good enough?"
While I want to maintain sensitivity to them, I don't want to be them. Not because they were horrible, but because I am not them. With that, I do want to focus on some of the amazingly positive things my parents taught me.
My dad gardens a lot. He tore up their entire backyard and turned it into a mass garden. Almost every place we have ever lived, he has something growing. My parents also have fixed up every place we have ever lived. I can't even begin to tell you the skill in home renovation I have. How many hours of my life have been spent painting? Building? Planting? Weeding?
My family has always sat around or below the poverty level in the U.S. We've never had much. Yet, we always had one of the nicest homes in our neighborhood. Usually when we moved in our home was the bane of the area. People cringed when they drove past. Even after a few months, the changes would become clear. By the end of a year, no one would ever know we had the fixer-upper.
I love it.
Part of the reason I became an artist is because I love beauty. I love to make beautiful things and I love to take beautiful things I see and put them in a format people can appreciate.
My parents taught me that. Not in words but in deed. I learned from an early age it should be our goal to leave every place better than when we came. I know they meant that in a physical sense but I also believe it true in a spiritual sense.
Every place I go, I want to make more beautiful, cleaner, better. But, every person I come into contact with I also want to leave in a better place than when I met them. I want to build them up, love them, make their life just a little bit easier and brighter. And, more than anything, show them Christ because He can transform them and make them new.
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