Cultivating Fruit

 I ask them to complete a task . . . like to clean the kitchen. When I get home, I see that they haven’t mopped the floor. In my head, mopping the floor is a part of cleaning the kitchen, so when I asked my child to clean the kitchen…I assumed this would be done. But my kids don’t live in my head and I had never communicated my exact and complete definition of what a clean kitchen is. 

Being the mother of grown children along with being the grown child of parents is a strange experience. Having the benefit of the two perspectives has given me many opportunities for thought. 

It is very common for people to communicate incompletely. It’s an epidemic, and the cause of a lot of resentment and conflict in relationships. 

We are in our own heads, and we forget that other people are not. Since we have the benefit of understanding where every thought is rooted and where it leads, it can be easy to communicate part of the intended message while leaving gaps that the other person then fills in for themselves. This leaves room for miscommunication and conflict. 

I think this happens generally with love. A lot of the things I’ve done have been motivated by love for my children and from a desire to promote their welfare. But all of the things I’ve done to promote their welfare has left me stressed out, overstimulated and tired many times. So I snap at them when they ask me a question or I yell at them to clean their room. All of the love that provoked all the work I did is drowned out by their feeling unloved because I was unkind. 

The Bible says that people will know me by my fruit. Am I cultivating the fruit I intend to cultivate? Or am I cultivating something to its detriment? Am I communicating to the people that I love that I love them? Or am I so busy in doing things to promote their welfare that I end up communicating that they are annoying or too much?