My husband and I went grocery shopping. In the parking lot, there was a car parked where there wasn’t a parking space. It wasn’t that the driver hadn’t tried to park. They did. They just parked diagonally in the middle of the aisle instead of in between the lines of a regular parking space. Both my husband and I couldn’t believe someone could be so stupid. When we finished shopping the car was still there. My husband made the comment that he was disappointed that he didn’t get to see the person who would park that way. When he made that comment, the first thing that popped into my head was, “But that person is still a child of God who carries the light of God within him.”
I felt a little guilty thinking that the person was so stupid. I realized it was that person represented my greatest fear. The person almost certainly believed that they were parking in an actual parking space. They didn’t know they were making a mistake. And yet everyone else who saw their car afterward just thought the driver was stupid and some kind of idiot. People judged that person on one little mistake without knowing anything else about them. It’s such a cruel world sometimes. I don’t want to accidentally make a mistake without knowing and then have the rest of the world think the worst of me for it. And while I can control my own actions, I can’t control what anyone thinks of me. I can’t be perfect all the time. I will make mistakes unknowingly.
The salvation I have is knowing that God already knows all my flaws, He already seen all the mistakes I’ll make in my life, He knows all my sins, and yet He still loves and accepts me as His perfect creation. He wants me to love myself as His perfection creation, too. And if I can do that, then maybe I can look at some idiot parking in the aisle of a parking lot and realize that I’m not just seeing someone who made an awful mistake parking their car, I’m also looking at someone I should love as much as I love myself.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
