What I Learned in March...

I'm linking up with Emily P. Freeman at Chatting at the Sky for today's post.

*********************************

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.