Honor Your Father and Mother

Like I said earlier, I had to defriend someone from my FaceBook account because she was being disrespectful to her mama.

Now, the Lord knows that I have not made the best decisions all the time when it comes to dealing with my own mother, but despite how angry she has ever made me-- and she has done so A LOT!!!-- I have never, never, never, EVER called her out of her name or in any way threatened her.

This child (teenager, going to 12th grade) is the daughter of a friend of mine. At first I thought it was cute when I received her friend request. But that changed QUICKLY! See, my friend and her daughter are having a hard time relating right now for a number of reasons. There seems to be so much more to the story that I am not privy to, but that is their business and I respect that. Anyway, I have been noticing the daughter writing things in her status that are, in my opinion, extremely disrespectful towards her mother. I know she intentionally writes those things to hurt her mom since her mother can see everything she writes. I wrote her a private message letting her know that, although I do not know what all is going on between them, life is so short and is not at all promised to us. I asked her, essentially, to ask herself this: If your mother died today, would you be forever okay with the way things are between you? If your answer is yes, then there is really nothing else I can say other than to just keep it moving. But if the answer is no,then you need to make sure that you take the necessary steps on your end to start making it right today. Once we are gone, it will be too late the say the things we should have said or to take back the things we knew we should not have said. I left it there and went about about my business.

The child did not respond to my message and, in fact, continued to post disrespectful status messages toward her mother. I guess, in her reckless youth, she made the decision she felt she needed to.

The last straw for me, though, was this final exchange (paraphrased): (Warning: foul language)

(apparently, the mother had written and told the child she loved her)

Friend's daughter's status message: Seriously, just leave me the f*** alone!
Daughter's friend #1: What's going on? Whose ass do I need to kick?
Daughter's friend #2: So, your (sic) gonna kick her mother's ass? LMAO!
Friend's daughter: LMAO!!!

Okay! I was HOT I tell you! I had reached the end of my rope with this little girl! The level of disrespect was just too much! So rather than beating her with a red hot poker or saying what was REALLY on my mind, I just deleted her from my friends list so I'd never have to see her disrespectful posts again. I understand that it does, indeed, take a village to raise a child, but I also understand that not everyone in the village has permission to beat the child's butt.

It does seem, though, that somewhere along the way the message of honoring your father and mother (Ephesians 6:2-3) got missed. I'm just saying...