Monday, May 1, 2017
I offer you a brief personal
story today.
This morning, someone did
something that annoyed me. In fact, he does it often and it annoys me every time
he does it, and I’ve never let him know that because I don’t want to come
across as a pain in the neck. It’s not a big thing; in fact, it’s a very little
thing. But I get annoyed every time he does it, which is almost every day. And
sometimes when he does it and I am under the spell of “being annoyed,” I think
unkind thoughts about him. Does this ever happen to you?
But something was different
about it today. He did that-thing-which-I- get-annoyed-about, and I looked at
it almost from outside of myself, and I noticed the thing, and I also noticed
my tendency to get annoyed. But for some reason---call it the grace of the Holy
Spirit, if you’d like---today I wasn’t annoyed. I was simply watching the
dynamic at play. The action, the habitual response, and now, this new thing:
the reality that I could observe it and actually choose to just let it
be.
Now he’s probably not going to
stop doing that thing. The object of all this is not to change his behavior,
after all. The object of all of this is to notice my internal behavior
and to find out whether or not I have the option of living in a more loving and
tolerant way. That is the ultimate goal, after all, a goal which we should all
share in to one extent or another: the ability to choose to live in a more
loving and tolerant way.
He’s going to keep doing that
thing, so I going to have to keep remembering what happened today and ask God
to help me continue growing in a more loving way.
Maybe it was just a May 1 gift.
After all, spring is trying to break through, just a little bit of light broke
through the clouds that are often in my own life. How about you!
God bless you!
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