The big, blank mirror on the wall…

     A while back, I painted the wall on the south side of our kitchen. It needed to be touched up anyway, due to chairs backing into it and such, and the dark red that it was painted was just a bit too dark for this small room...making the room seem smaller than it actually was. I decided to paint it while Joel was out of town, so that he would come home to a little surprise. I picked out a soft shade of blue (this being one of Joel’s favorite colors), and set to work painting it early one morning before the kids woke up. Since it wasn’t an overly large space, it only took a couple of hours to finish it. After the wall was completed, I hung this big in-expensive mirror on it to give the room a larger feel. I’ve always thought that it was kind of plain, but it was an easy update and I don’t like things to look too cluttered.

     A couple of weeks ago, the kids were behaving very badly all week…talking back to Dad and Mom, being unkind to their siblings, not sharing, and so on. It seemed like every time I turned around, I was having to discipline one or more of them. Due to their behavior, my patience was getting worn out by the hour and I was getting very frustrated and burned out. It was on one of these days, while we were eating lunch at the table, that I had noticed that that big mirror needed to be cleaned up because of the splatters from the kids (or maybe more accurately because of the many flies that land on it and leave a little mark of I don’t even want to know what behind). As I was giving myself a mental note to clean that, I had one of those “ahah” moments, and I thought to myself, what a perfect location to write something meaningful!

     So, after the 3 youngest kids were down for a nap and the lunch dishes were cleaned up, that’s just what I did. I chose a Bible verse that I thought would be a wonderful verse for each member in our family to remember.

“Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Ephesians 4:32

     I explained the verse to each of the kids and have had them memorize it, so that whenever they are unkind, Joel and I can just speak a few words of this verse and they know they have to straighten up. It also made this big, blank, boring mirror a whole lot more useful. I plan on changing the verse every couple of weeks or so, so that our memory work can be right in front of us and keep us more accountable.