Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live for a long time in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
Exodus 20:12
S ometimes the hardest people to love are the ones closest to you. It’s easier to love people you see only from a distance, but the ones you see up close can be unimpressive, even unkind. But the truth is that we’re all like that up close. No one is perfect, and the closer you get the more you see those imperfections. And that’s why parents can be so much trouble. Not only do you see all their blemishes and smell all their stinks, but you have to deal with all their emotional, spiritual, and mental weaknesses. When they tell you what to do it can be hard to respect them, hard to not roll your eyes or to laugh, but then God knew that, didn’t he? “Honor your father and your mother” (Exod. 20:12). It was such an important command that it made the Top 10 list.
Your parents were given to you to make you stronger. And though they might sometimes do that by godly example and insight, sometimes they do it by accident. No matter what your parents do, the most spiritual response to them is honor and respect, if only for their position as parents. Knowing this can help you to stop taking everything that comes from them as insanity or old age setting in and start thinking about it like direction from God. Each time you give up what you want to do to do whatever your parents want, you build your spiritual strength and show God and the world that his desires are more important to you than your own. Doing what God wants you to do means doing what your parents want you to do, plain and simple. So unless they are asking you to sin, the God Girl has got to obey, and out of that will come holiness.