Remember that I said in my last blog that I still had to write the rest of the blog before that; the one about patience? Well, I'm thinking that now is the best opportunity for me to do that. God really showed me today the importance of being slow to anger, not let my fears take over me, and to above all be quite and patient.
I started out this day mildly wrong. I woke up from a bad dream and before I could allow myself time to pray (#1 wrong choice) I let the fears and worries sink in. What did I do? I went immediately to the computer and started to e-mail (#2 wrong choice). Instead of giving encouragement I opened my mouth and wrath came out. I wasn't as hurtful as I could've been and in some ways maybe I wasn't hurtful at all, but I was wrong in sending the e-mails. I may not have been wrong about what needed to be said, but perhaps I was the wrong one to say it. I should've stopped, looked, and listened like I knew I should've done. If I had I would've heard God say, "Katie, you're being tested by satan. He's testing your strength by using the one person, with the one horrible thing, that gets to you the most. You've got to hold fast and be strong my daughter. You can't let him get to you like that because once he does, no matter how hard you try, he'll dig even deeper to try and tear you a part from you soul mate. Do you want that?"
A while back I pulled one of those infamous fortune sticks that I've talked about before. I appreciate that stick so much because it was a reminder that I speak so much louder with my words when they are negative than positive and much like weight management, it takes a lot longer to get rid of the weight of a negative comment than it does adding on the encouragement through positive comments. You can send positive after positive but all it takes is one negative to strike the core and all those little positives come tumbling down.
God also humbled me today and really put me in my place because I was starting to climb up that high horse again. As I'm sitting here thinking, I'm reminded of my own words just a few days ago that ALL of us are sinners and that ALL of us are going to be judged. If I'm not supposed to judge someone's choices because they're equivalent to my own. God sees no difference, sin is merely sin in His eyes. So today, we both sinned and it didn't matter what the difference was.
The only reason the choices and sin of someone else hurts is because you love that person and satan knew that by using them he was able to get to you. That's what he did to me this morning. He gave me bad dream set with characters from my fears and then he used me, through my language and negative encouragement to tear down someone I love dearly.
I hope that this afternoon we were able to counteract his efforts by forgiving each other and not judging each other for their choices of sin, but that's besides the point.
I'm just glad that He showed me this lesson, that he humbled me because this is something that is a constant struggle for me. Sometimes I simply just need to listen to my fortune stick when it reads, "You are aggressive. Be quiet and listen today."
