Open Hands · Week 3 · Wednesday · INSECURITY
The report card came home on a Tuesday and she felt it in her stomach before she had finished the first line.
Not worry for him. She knows what worry for him feels like and this was not it. This was closer to exposure — the sensation of a document about her having been prepared by people she has never met, mailed to her house, and left sitting on the counter where anybody who walked in could read it.
She loves her son. But so many of us struggle; keeping our identity in the wrong place.
Somewhere over about four years, his results became the public record of how she is doing. And a bad line on that record does not read to her as a bad semester for a thirteen-year-old. It reads as a verdict on her. It happens to all of us in some form.
Freely Given
He predestined us for adoption as His sons through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the Beloved One.Ephesians 1:5–6 (BSB)
Adoption is the picture, and it is worth sitting with for a minute, because adoption is the one way of entering a family that has nothing whatever to do with the performance of the one entering it.
And then: freely given. Not achieved. Not maintained by continued good conduct. Not — and this is the one for Wednesday — earned on your behalf by somebody else who is doing well.
Her standing with God has not moved by one inch in either direction because of a line on a sheet of paper from a middle school. It was not available to move. It was settled before she had done anything, and it is not keyed to her son’s transcript any more than it is keyed to her own.
He never agreed to carry her identity. He does not know he is carrying it.
What It Cost
She gave it back to him.
Which sounds gentle, and was not. What it meant in practice was that she did not do any of the four things she had already drafted in her head by the time she reached the kitchen: the lecture, the plan, the study schedule, the tutor by Friday.
She asked him what he thought about it.
And then she stopped talking, and that was the hard part — not the question, the silence after it. He gave her an answer that was shorter and vaguer than she wanted. A shrug, mostly. Something about the one class being harder this year.
She let that be the whole of it.
Here is what it costs to do that, and nobody warns you. Handing the thing back does not feel like trust while you are doing it. It feels like negligence. Every instinct she has says that a good mother would be doing something right now, and the stillness feels like proof that she is not one.
The card is still on the counter. She has not moved it to the drawer where it would stop being the first thing she sees, and she says she is trying not to, which is a smaller and more honest thing than saying she has made her peace with it.
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