I'm linking up with Emily P. Freeman at Chatting at the Sky for today's post.
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In many ways, March was a good month. I can't deny that. But it wasn't the easiest. It was a messy month, and in many ways, it was a month where I feel like what I learned best was how much I don't know.
You could say it was a good month for growing patience. Yay! My favorite... (Said no one ever, right?) There was a lot of waiting: waiting in traffic, waiting for news, waiting only to learn that there will be more waiting.
And all the waiting -- so impatiently because waiting really isn't my thing -- opened my eyes to all my forms of impatience. I was more aware of the times I snapped at my kids instead of given a thought-through response. Because of things I've been through, I generally advocate taking a loving approach toward your body through exercise and nutrition, listening to it and not pushing it to pain. But this month, I heard my inner voice criticizing myself a lot -- even for doing modified push-ups at seven months pregnant. I know, crazy! Where did this impatience come from?
And it was a month of realizing how much I don't understand. For instance, one of my close friends in California texted me early in the month asking me to pray a friend of her teenage daughter (actually, this girl was friends with two of my friends' daughters) who had been involved in a tragic car accident. She was just a little older than Jayna, and she passed away a couple days later. I read news articles about her, and it was just hard to take. Why do the sweetest, brightest stars seem to leave too soon?
In March, time and again, I kept said, "I just don't get it." Yet in my heart, the words resonated, "God in His infinite wisdom..." And really, that was it. I can't explain much. I don't understand. I just know that I am small, and He is big. He knows what I won't, at least for a long while. He sees the whole masterpiece while I'm focusing on tiny dots or brush strokes.
But I feel like, these moments of magnified impatience and lack of wisdom opened my eyes a little, too. I was also working through a Sermon on the Mount devotion from She Reads Truth, and so I read again about removing the speck in someone else's eye, while ignoring the plank in your own. (Matthew 7:3-5)
I get so impatient with other people, and criticize their lack of patience or wisdom (usually to myself and a select, "lucky" few). I say, "The should know better by now!" And what I learned a little better this past month is that we're never "done" learning these character traits. I will never be able to say, "Patience? Oh, yeah, I got that one. Wisdom? Sure. Check." Instead, I'll be working on them for my whole life, even when I'm a very old woman.
And so, really, all I can expect from others... is the same.
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