When something annoys me, when something gets in the way of what I was hoping would happen, I’m quick to grumble, to look for faults in others, to simplify a reason for a complex problem and point fingers.
There’s a song by the Christian band needtobreathe that always gets me. It goes:
Be the wheels and not the track.
Be the wanderer that’s coming back.
Leave the past right where it’s at.
Be more heart and less attack.
Often I can be far too much attack and too little heart.
In short, I can be a jerk.
But you know what? As someone whose job it is to respond to correspondence from Women of the ELCA participants across the country, I know I’m not the only one who gets a little grumpy sometimes. (Sidenote: We at Gather really, truly want every one of our magazines to arrive on time and in perfect condition. But if for some reason that doesn’t happen, six exclamation points at the end of your email will not help the situation.)
It’s okay to get a little grumpy sometimes. Everyone has bad days, and we all make occasional, less-than-optimal choices in our interactions with people. That’s one of the many reasons it’s great to be a Lutheran, right?
Sinner and saint
We know that we are both sinner and saint, that we mess up, but we are also capable of forgiving and being forgiven.
I was reminded of this recently when I was trying to help my mom park her car in the snow. After refusing to follow several of my suggestions, my mom got out of her car and said to me, “I’m scared if I move anymore, I won’t be able to get the car back out.”
I looked at my mom, one of my favorite people in the whole world, and had a terrifying flashback to a time when I was trying to park my own car outside my apartment in Chicago.
After watching a woman park across two spots, I pleaded with her to make a little room for me. “If I move, you’ll park too close to me, and I won’t be able to get out,” she said.
I’d probably lose my job if I wrote what I said to her on the Women of the ELCA blog.
How do we start?
It was so easy to be angry with that stranger—not so much with my own mom.
But isn’t it often the case that we don’t really stop to think about our behavior until it affects us or someone we love? We know it’s not supposed to be that way, but still go on treating each other with so little heart.
Acknowledging this problem is a good start, but we are called to repent, which means not just admitting our mistakes, but turning away from them, continuing in a different direction.
So how do we start?
In my case I think perhaps it’s helpful to remind myself that the world isn’t perfect—and neither am I. Sometimes people are, indeed, jerks. And sometimes I am too.
I need patience and grace, and I need to extend it to everyone else.
The end of that needtobreathe song is a helpful reminder:
I’m nearly sanctified; I’m nearly broken.
I’m down the river to where I’m going…
Sarah Carson is associate editor of Gather magazine.
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