Hello…guilt.

We were laying on the living room floor with her books spread out in front of us. Her hair had been in those squeeze-them-tight pink sponge rollers the night before and perfect little ringlets fell across her little face. She had one leg kicked up behind her and her chin rested on her hand. Her big blue-green eyes stared into mine and she just looked lost.

Frustration was the guest of the hour.

Page after page she read as she skipped over words, mispronounced words, replaced words with her own and we were both extremely exhausted with this process. For days now, that was how we spent our afternoons. Spinning through the delicate cycle of learning to read and we were not making much progress.

While cooking dinner that night my thoughts began to wander back to my pregnancy and her days of infancy. After all, I had one over-achiever child that did everything exactly right on cue as an infant, toddler and child, what had gone so dramatically different with this one?

All those extreme only-way-to-parent Nazi articles I read about DHA and Omega-3 fats found in breast-milk began to flash back in my mind. They said if I didn’t breast-feed that she would not be as quick to retain information! Those articles and the La Leche nurses from the hospital haunted me in those moments. Maybe they were right.

I didn’t read stories to her in the womb like other articles said I should and I didn’t hold up those stinkin baby Einstein flash cards to her face at six-months old. Poor thing never listened to an ounce of classical music and I let her have that paci until she was three!

Yes, it was my fault. I was a horrible mother and my child would now suffer for the rest of her life. Go ahead, just lock me up for motherhood mayhem. I had done everything the wrong way.

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

But in those moments I knew that guilt was never a true friend of mine and I would eventually have to move past the company of such negativity. So the next day I opened up my Bible and found myself in John 9 where Jesus heals a man born blind.

Seriously, the disciples tended to ask some off the wall questions from time to time. But, I was thankful that this particular question they asked on this day wasn’t given the talk-to-the-hand-brotha-that-was-so-inappropriate response.

One of the disciples asked this question: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Sounds a little familiar. What did I do wrong to cause this child to have these struggles?

 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”

And as those words fell into my soul, I began to start ripping the guilt factor out. Because in all honesty, there are probably things I could have done better but I did the best job that I could do. Instead, I started viewing this struggle with our little girl as yet another way for God to make Himself known to us. While we are still knee-deep in the beginning stages of defining her struggles –God is already working.

His work [like that verse said] is shinning through her and this situation. Because God doesn’t need a diagnosis, a label or a statistic to begin His work. He’s not in the wavering business. Faithfulness was proved yesterday and will be once again proved today.

So take that guilt. Bye. See-ya.

He’s there. He’s working. He’s interested. He’s focused. And He’s working everything [even this] out for His good.