Security from Within

I hate being a procrastinator! Sorry to leave you hanging forever. I told myself I would try to write on here each and every day...then I realized that was a bit, okay a lot, far fetched so we are going for at least weekly! :)
We had 12" of snow Tuesday and Wednesday of this week! WOW! The most we have had in 13 years! So the kids have had a total of 4 snow days this year already. I really love having them home with me but I dread them having to make them up at the end of the school year. But with snow days comes bored kids which in turn means kids making messes, mom getting irritated at the messes, etc.
Last night was one such experience that I feel as though truly touched my heart. My blessed little Sierra is such a sweet, loving, and giving child and not unlike her mother, a bit scatterbrained! I tell her each and every day to clean out her cats litter box and dispose of the "contents" in a Walmart bag (thanks Walmart!) and put it outside in our container. But each time she gets distracted and well, the room doesn't smell like a bed of roses lets just say. Yesterday was one of those days. They were bored, I was irritated and Sierra left the bag of um..contents in the bedroom. Mind you, we have a 5 month old very curious Lab puppy named Patrick. Patrick sees a nice stinky bag of cat litter as either a piece of outside brought indoors for his digging pleasure or a snack...I'm not sure. But, none the less, a mess was made. A rather large mess. A rather stinky mess. So, when Sierra came into the room needless to say, I wasn't happy, at all. I repeatedly reminded her in a very stern but controlled voice that this never would have happened had she just listened to me the first 100 times. You know the saying; "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times!" She blamed it on Patrick who was partly to blame but she took it like an adult as I complained to her and told her there would be consequences such as taking away her beloved cell phone or getting rid of her cat, which is her dearest treasure, if she doesn't get it cleaned up first thing in the morning. When I finished, she simply turned over and went to sleep, or so I thought.
As I sit in bed reading my Bible, my eyebrows furrowed, still fuming about the mess in the bedroom I felt a familiar nudging to go over and talk to Sierra. I thought; "Okay God, I'll go in a few minutes. I need for her to know that this a a bad thing and I'm not going to tolerate it." As though I was jerked up off the bed, next thing I knew I was sitting on Sierra's bed. When she turned over, she was sobbing, hard. You could tell she had been for awhile. I laid down on the bed with her, held her in my arms and cried with her. The worst feeling in the world for a mom, is to make her baby cry. As I lay holding my baby crying and squeezing her tight, I felt the Lord tell me; "Angie, you make mistakes and I don't keep badgering you. You do the same things over and over and I don't threaten to take away the things you love most. I love you even with all the mistakes you've made."
What started out as a sad, painful evening, turned out to be quite a blessing. I invited Sierra to come to my bed for a mommy/daughter sleepover. We talked, giggled, cuddled and decided how to fix the problem and God again, blessed the night. God is amazing!