Mae Mae and Pop, and a quick little "rant" at the end:)

We "scooted" over to Guntersville today for a quick picnic lunch with Mae Mae and Pop.  It was perfect weather for an afternoon spent outside with a view of beautiful Lake Guntersville!!  John was able to toddle around, and Ada loved climbing and sliding and swinging the afternoon away.

Ada's attitude and disobedience joined us on our little afternoon out.  I am about to pull my hair out.  I spent some time talking to my mom about it tonight, trying to get a more experienced--walked the road before me--perspective.  I just feel discouraged by her behavior.  It's never an encouraging thing as a mom when your child is blatantly disobedient and disrespectful and argumentative and need I keep listing?  

A nice reminder of my own sinful nature and the very reason why Christ hung on the cross, right?  I was saying to Ada tonight, as we read in her Jesus Storybook Bible, it is your disobedience and bad attitude and my disobedience and bad attitude that made the cross necessary (I doubt I used the word necessary in the conversation, but you know what I mean...)  I don't know if she got it.  She asked lots and lots of questions, including--pointing to a picture of the three crosses--"is this on the moon?"  No, Ada, Jesus didn't die on a cross on the moon(?!!!)  I just pray that somehow in her three year old heart she can understand that all she has to do is ask Jesus to give her a new clean heart and he will.  HE WILL!!!  

I am so thankful that when God looks at me he sees Christ.  What relief.  What absolute relief that I don't even have to fear death itself.  God conquered that.  He conquered that!!!  All we have to do is understand that there is no good in us.  We are guilty at our very core.  It is who we are by nature.  But God, he sent his very own son...His SON!!! to hang on that cross, being punished in our place, so that we can get to God.  So that we can know Him.  He is so Holy, so Perfect and without stain or blemish, that we can't, apart from Christ, approach Him.  But Christ, because of the Cross, can make us clean, and then, and only then, can we know God.  It's not something we did.  It's Christ, all Christ!!!!!  

Surely he has borne our griefs

and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

smitten by God, and afflicted

But he was wounded for our transgressions;

he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

and with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray;

we have turned--every one--to his own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

Isaiah 53:4-6.