Cheese & Grace

Right now, one of the most spiritual things happening in my life is shredded cheese. Specifically shredded cheddar and mozzarella. Cheese is teaching me about parenting, God, and life.
The first lesson I am learning from cheese is how much, as a parent, I am willing to do to make my child happy, even if its at my own expense. This I realize will be nowhere near the Top 50 parenting sacrifices I will make over the next decades, however this is where it starts. With cheese. Noah loves shredded cheese, I hate it. But cheese is good for him and cheese makes him happy so I will spend a few combined hours each week or month cleaning it up. Vacuuming it, mopping it, wiping the greasy streaks it makes up off the floor, shaking it out of clothes and cleaning the remnants of it out of the bathtub at night. I will scrape it off the bristles of my broom and dig it out of the dirt devil and the crevices of the high chair. Sick.
Cheese is also teaching me about grace-one of the hardest aspects of my faith for me to grasp and live by. Cheese is like us. We are kinda gross, kinda good, kinda everywhere all the time. We get stuck in some pretty strange places and cause some messes, but with Gods love we can become something beautifully tasty in this world.
Cheese is also the messes that we make in our life. All the time. Every day. No matter how much God cleans up after us and gets everything back in its place, we still make a new mess each day. Yet God's mercies are new every morning. He gives us cheese (love & grace) each day, despite how we handled it or what we did with it yesterday. I don't stop giving Noah cheese because he makes a giant mess with it. God doesn't stop giving me love and forgiveness because I make a giant mess of it either. Cheese & grace may sometimes actually end up in my mouth and go down into my stomach to nourish me and fill me up. Other times they ends up ground into the floor or thrown into the trashcan. But either way I get as much as I will need again tomorrow. Praise God for cheese & grace!