Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Allison. Today's scripture offers us a wiser way of being human as we step into the day.

Today's reading comes from Exodus 2012, a verse that many of us have heard and one that many people carry strong feelings about, especially in this cultural

moment. Honor your father and mother so that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God

is giving you. This verse is situated within the Ten Commandments. It's the Fifth Commandment.

And before we get into what honoring parents

doesn't mean, I want to name why this commandment exists at all. Honoring one's mother and

father is foundational because parents are our first teachers and how the world works, how love is

given, how authority is handled, how conflict is navigated,

how care is expressed. Even when parenting is imperfect, and it always is, our parents

represent our first encounter with dependence, with limitation, with love, really, right? To honor our parents at its core is to acknowledge that we did not

create ourselves. It's a posture of humility toward the reality that we were formed in relationship,

right? We live not as isolated units. We exist in communities, in systems of interconnected people.

Our lives came to us through others with all of the complexity that entails and with all the beauty.

What's really interesting is that biblically, this commandment sits at a hinge point.

It bridges our relationship with God and our relationships

with one another. It's the first commandment of the Ten Commandments that comes in a relational

context, and it comes with a promise, not because it's transactional or as if our obedience to

this commandment is automatically going to

earn us a blessing, but because of the deeper psychology and wisdom in the idea that honoring our

origins and the fact that we're located within a interconnected web of other humans, right?

None of us comes into this world alone,

tends to orient us toward life with gratitude and humility rather than resentment or pride.

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