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Key Bible Verse: You must make allowance for each other's faults and forgive the person who offends you (Colossians 3:13). Bonus Reading: Colossians 3:12-14

My love growing up was baseball. Dad worked long hours and didn't come to my games. But my last year in Little League, we played the league-leading team in a real stadium! I was so proud to have Dad finally see me play center field. I got two hits off one of the league's best pitchers. The game ended. I felt good, ready for Dad to congratulate me on my hitting. Instead: "You missed that fly ball. You should have charged it. You could have caught it." I was devastated.

I held it against him for years. But then I started going to my son Sam's games. As we'd drive home, it would take everything in me to not say, "You took a called strike three." That's when I really forgave Dad. Now I see that Dad saw the potential and wanted me to be better. He knew I could have caught that ball if I'd charged it. But all I could see back then was that I was a failure in his eyes.

Loving our parents means we quit holding their humanness against them. We let them be fallible, like us. God wants your parents to experience forgiveness from any place they can get it—especially from you.

—Paul Tokunaga in Faith on the Edge

My Response: I'll ask God to dissolve resentment for how I may have been hurt by my parents.

Thought to Apply: Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.—OSCAR WILDE (playwright)

Adapted from Faith on the Edge (InterVarsity, 1999) by permission.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine. Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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Prayer for the Week

Lord, I realize that honoring my parents is a part of fully honoring You. Help me to lovingly fulfill this obligation.

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