TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY: COMPASSION AT HOME

“The Lord is full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.”

Psalms 103:8

Okay, these are the easier days. This activity is so important and there are so many people involved that you have two days to practice.

It’s easy to have compassion for our children. We give them endless space to be who they are, faults and all!

But do we do that with our partners? Siblings? Relatives? We are more likely to give compassion to our friends than to any of our relatives, especially our partners! And yet, it is our partners who are our greatest teachers in life. They volunteered to help us grow and develop emotionally and spiritually—maybe not consciously—but that is what they unconsciously signed up for! Find it in your heart to have compassion for them—you may not be an easy task!

I know my husband deserves a medal of valor and compassion for the life he has with me! I obviously had a lot of lessons to learn, and he is doing a great job in spite of difficult circumstances. I need to remind myself of that more often!

When we are self-orientated, we see our partner as the problem. We don’t even know we are projecting onto them all of our “stuff” and not really seeing their heart. We see the image that we have created based on our past—not the truth of who they are.

When we are compassionate, we understand that without our partners, we would be stagnating, and that they have taken on a big task. We find gratitude for them and their gift; we understand the challenge they face with us, and have a sense of the difficulties they experience as they help us grow.

Teenagers deserve compassion, as they may be the greatest teachers of all. Try to remember what it was like when you had hormones coursing through your body and you loved and hated your parents at the same time. It’s amazing how we are seen as brilliant by our toddlers who want to be around us all the time, yet those same toddlers grow into teenagers who avoid us like the plague and think we are embarrassing, controlling and total morons! Our work is to love them, discipline them and teach them with compassion, despite what they think of us! It’s not easy, but someone has to do it and that someone would be you!

Teenagers too, need to have compassion for you, and the huge job you have taken on with them—but we are more grown-up than them, so it’s more our responsibility.

Remember that compassion is a blend of forgiveness, self-less–ness, unconditional love, grace and tenderness. And at times, it requires us to be firm.

These two days are all about constantly forgiving, focusing on others and not ourselves, giving everyone at home as much grace as you can—especially when they don’t deserve it, loving and accepting everyone as they are (a big one for most of us), and being as tender as you can with them.

Look for the habitual patterns of behavior we have adopted in our families and re-pattern them to include compassion. Think of these patterns as simply cast in sand—awaiting new patterns to be pressed into the. A good or blessed pattern will change everything.

If you can’t manage any of the above, then work on having a tender voice—show your love through your voice all day!