My daughter got into a car accident last night. She called me terrified. She said nobody was hurt, that the other vehicle wasn’t even damaged and that the guy driving the jacked up jeep (mid 20s) had already left because they weren’t going to report it because she would have gotten the ticket and she didn’t want her insurance to go up, so she let him leave. She drove home and was visibly upset when she got here. We went out to look at the damage and she cried and screamed and yelled at herself while standing in the dark in the driveway:
“I am so stupid! I know better than this! I know better! I am better than this!”
My heart broke for her as I listened to her cut herself down.
My mind is reeling with lessons from this event.
- I am grateful for Heavenly Father safely helping her to slow down. Nobody was hurt in this accident, and you better believe my daughter is going to learn from it. I have often thought on how she would be one who would not be able to forgive herself if she ever cause an accident where she took someone else’s life, so learning to be more careful now is a good lesson for her.
- Her beating herself over it is unrealistic.
- We have default plans in place for a reason. The guy saw that a 17 year old girl who was alone and terrified and convinced her not to call the police because she would be at fault. The more she told me about the situation, I think the guy would have been at fault. There are reasons we make decisions in life in advance! I won’t drink alcohol or take drugs etc. These are decisions we make in advance to protect ourselves and others at all costs. Calling an officer and getting a police report when there is an accident could be another.
- The world is severely lacking honest people. Why can’t we all just be honest? Why do we have to manipulate and hurt each other to make gains for ourselves? Some people seem inherit to it, to just put their gain ahead of everything else at all costs. It’s so weird. You can search the scriptures over and over and you will never find a time when Christ puts His own gain above that of anyone else.
- Judgement. There are different types of judgement to be made. My daughter assumed that because she FELT guilty that she really was. She assumed that she would have gotten the ticket and fine etc. Those assumptions were made, though, because of how she felt about herself. Just minutes before that, however, a guy manipulated those feelings of hers to convince her she was guilty, and so were those feelings she had formed about herself even accurate? . . . Regardless, because of them, she took away any chance she had at actually finding out how she would have been judged by the law. Emotional self-judgement and the judgement of the law are two completely different things independent of each other. How does this translate to us spiritually? Think on it for a second. We feel guilt. Sometimes that guilt is accurate of our behaviors. Sometimes has inaccurately been manipulated to be there. Who gets to decide which is which? Only the Savior gets to decide that. However, because we FEEL guilt we often take ourselves out of the option to be judged. We removed ourselves from His presence under the assumption that He wouldn’t want us there, that His judgement would reflect what we feel about ourselves. If only we really knew His heart … then we would never turn from His judgement. He is a much kinder judge than we are on ourselves, but most of the time, we don’t give Him the chance to show that to us. We pull away from prayer, or going to church, or reading our scriptures. We pull away from anything that would put us close to Him because of how we feel about ourselves. In the example with my daughter, a mid 20s guy with a jacked up jeep helped her decide she should blame herself. Who helps us spiritually decide to blame ourselves and beat ourselves up over it? Yep, Satan. That’s exactly what he wants; to remove us from Jesus’s presence. We will make mistakes in life, no doubt, that is just part of it, but we don’t have to move away from our Savior because of them. Telling the Savior about our “accidents”, trying to fix them and learn from them and moving forward in honesty with Him by our side is completely possible if we will only choose it.
His love and kindness is far greater than we realize.
Forever grateful.
