Which of the following are similar to the ways you've served Christ in your family? [check all that apply]
• Taught your kids to see God's glory in nature
• Washed the dishes without being asked
• Played a board game with your kids
• Encouraged your wife to finish her master's degree
• Attended a child's open house at school
• Worked fewer hours to be with your family
• Set an example of a godly prayer life for your children
• Held a crying child
• Swung on the tire swing with your daughter
• Told your wife why you're still in love with her
• Told your son he's got what it takes
• Coached soccer
• Let you child correct you now and then
• Fixed the vacuum cleaner
• Taught your sons to ride a bike
• Listened patiently to a complaint of your wife
• Taped your child's artwork to your office wall
• Admitted to your kids that you were wrong
• Told your children how Christ entered your life
• Cleaned up vomit
• Taught your children to love books
• Been romantic without expecting sex
• Told your daughter she's smart/beautiful
• Set standards for your kids and stuck to them
• Dealt graciously with a busybody neighbor
• Peeled carrots
• Watched movies together
Shattering Experience Theme of the Week: Go and Be Reconciled Thursday, September 5, 2002
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September/October 200255Shattering ExperienceTheme of the Week: Go and Be Reconciled Shattering Experience Theme of the Week: Go and Be Reconciled Thursday, September 5
Key Bible Verse: Now it is time to forgive him and comfort him. Otherwise he may become so discouraged that he won't be able to recover (2 Corinthians 2:7). Bonus Reading: Philemon 1-25
Loving actions communicate in unmistakable terms the reality of your forgiveness and your commitment to reconciliation. Thomas Edison understood this principle. When he and his staff were developing the incandescent light bulb, it took hundreds of hours to manufacture a single bulb. One day, after finishing a bulb, he handed it to a young errand boy and asked him to take it upstairs to the testing room. As the boy turned and started up the stairs, he stumbled and fell, and the bulb shattered on the steps. Instead of rebuking the boy, Edison reassured him and then turned to his staff and told them to start working on another bulb.
When it was completed several days later, Edison powerfully demonstrated the reality of his forgiveness. He walked over to the same boy, handed him the bulb, and said, "Please take this up to the testing room." Imagine how that boy must have felt. He knew that he didn't deserve to be trusted with this responsibility again. Yet, here it was, being offered to him as though nothing had ever happened. Nothing could have restored this boy to the team more clearly, more quickly, or more fully.
—Ken Sande in The Peacemaker
My Response: A way I could demonstrate the reality of my forgiveness to _____ is …
Thought to Apply: When a deep injury is done to us,
we never recover until we forgive. —Alan Paton (So. Africa)
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