A breath of fresh grace

I love to read. I've always got a book of some kind lying dog-eared on the couch. Well, let's be honest...usually two or three! I bounce back and forth between reading relaxing, small-town, those-were-the-days kinds of fiction, and reading Christian non-fiction by great authors who help me understand how to live out what I believe. This week it's been non-fiction, and do I ever have a book recommendation for you!

Grace-Based Parenting by Tim Kimmel

If you're the kind of person who has a naturally relaxed view of life, feels self-confident in your decisions, easily lets yourself and other people off the hook, and doesn't have a propensity toward hyperventilation, you may walk away from this book saying, "Well, DUH!!"

However.

If you're the kind of person who has the tendency to view things as black-and-white, battles a slightly elevated fear of failure (ahem), leans - just a tidge - toward perfectionism (double ahem), and whose husband may or may not have to occassionally hand you a paper bag to slow your breathing...this book will bowl. you. over.

Oh my.

Grace is just one of those things that I deeply appreciate about God, but have such a hard time getting my heart wrapped around. It's also a very hard thing to pour out until you've fully absorbed it yourself. You know how we all have "issues" that we don't want to dump all over our kids, but if we're not careful we do it anyway because it's just our default mode? Yeah. This is one of mine. Lovely, I know.

Anyhoo, this book was such a breath of fresh air. A strong encouragment to me of the way that things can be - the way they really should be. I read it straight through in a day and a half because I couldn't put it down. I'm going to read it again at a slower pace with my man. I told him that I wanted us to read it together so that we would be unified in our ideation.

He said that ideation wasn't a word.

I said, "Look it up, pal."

He did.

I was right.

You'd think he would be used to that by now. Silly fella.

That's OK, I think I'll give him some GRACE!!