Blessings of a Little Girl

I moved back home about a month ago after living on my own the past four years. It definitely has been a fiery experience for me as I am finally having to face all that I had run away from during my undergraduate years in college. ha. welcome to reality. I'm realizing how good my undergraduate years has been for me, but also how more than it being a prediction of what my life would look like in the future I felt that it was a training to prepare for what would be awaiting me back at home. Haha, I feel like I'm making living at home sound like it's some beast monster that is after my life. I'll try my best to not make this as dramatic as I like to make things. Anyway, I've struggled submitting to my parents -- well my mom, simply because I grew up with a cocky mentality that I was better than them and that they didn't know better since they weren't as educated as I was and especially because they were not professed believers. Whenever I came across those places of scripture when God would command us to "obey our parents" or those proverbs that would encourage us that we are to be a blessing to our mothers and fathers, I felt my spirit cringe. I thought, what if what they are saying is not right? What if, what my parents want me to do is ungodly?

I've been meditating on the prodigal son story this week, and boy can I say that I have related with the 'good' older brother so many times in the past that I could probably stick my name in there. I sympathize with him at so many levels. For the most part, I grew up doing the 'right' things-- studying, getting good grades, going to a good school, not doing drugs, and just all those things korean parents think makes a "good" child. In the story of the prodigal child, we see this lost son who did everything a "good" child wouldn't do -- he took his share of the money from his father and went off to a far away place just using his money for his own pleasure by living in debauchery. He got to the point where he spent everything he was given, and he ended up becoming so poor that he had to enslave himself to a foreign people eating what pigs had to eat. He became so desperate that he decided to go back home. To his surprise, his father welcomed him with a big celebration because he was so happy that his son had returned. What I would like to focus on is the response of the older son. Here is a glimpse of the story after the older son was notified of what happened when his troublemaker younger brother returned: Luke 15: 28-30

²⁸"The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. ²⁹But he answered his father, 'Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. ³⁰But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!'

I have honestly had these pharisaic attitudes not only in my own family, but even in the church. There were times when my brothers got more attention because they were causing trouble, and I felt those icky feelings in me almost out of this place of jealousy that I was not receiving something that I actually deserved. What stands out to me in this passage is when the older son says that he's been "slaving" for his father and how his father never gave him anything to celebrate. Just being in the home, I can say that there have been so many moments when I have felt that I have "slaved" myself to my family. What makes it a "slave" mentality is that I was doing all these "right" things in my own eyes to find my identity in them and acceptance by them. And the story of the older son pangs me because I could hear the sadness in his father's heart that his own son did not know his identity as a son. The older son was working to become worthy of his father's affections, when his father's affections were already fully available to him.

As I am walking into this place of becoming my own individual, apart from these various identities that I had taken upon myself for most of my life, I am coming to a place where I can say that I know my identity as a daughter in the family. That, I no longer desire to hold this slave mentality out of my insecurity, but that out of the freedom of knowing that I am loved I want to choose to be a blessing to my mother and father because they are the ones God has given to me. It is no longer that I am trying to do the right things to find approval from my family, but that I want to choose to honor and obey them out of the overflow of my being because I really believe when the scriptures say that children are to be a blessing to their parents.

³¹" [my little girl],' the father said, 'you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. ³²But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' "

btw. I started another blog for my personal adventures as I explore the city. It is called "the adventures of a little korean girl" http://adventurewithhatty.blogspot.com