The Beauty of Grace

There are not too many things one can do to get me all riled up, but I remember a few years ago someone managed to do just that…

The finer details have long been forgotten but, at the time the issue came to my attention, I had no access to the offender. The longer I thought about what was said, the more I fumed, and the very next friend who asked me how I was doing got an earful… all the way down to the urge I had then to give the offender a solid punch.

She listened, for however long it took for me to get it all out, before dropping this gem…

[Warning: Reality check ahead]

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“They have a problem with (x), but you have a problem with anger and we need to talk about that.”

True.

Personal spiritual issues trump peripheral issues any day of the week.

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Anger Management 101 (Courtesy of a Wise Mother)

*Updated from journal entry dated February 3, 2014.*

The day I turned 13, she gave me a gift. It was a book entitled, Everything A Teenage Girl Should Know.

The hardback version. I have always been an avid reader, and this was the kind of book designed to survive numerous rounds of reading and re-reading. Perfect.

Mom and I never had the talk. That conversation which some refer to as being about ‘the birds and the bees’, although I still have no idea what birds and bees have to do with human sexuality – but, I digress.  This was Mom’s way of getting an uncomfortable conversation out of the way with as little discomfort as possible. I am sure she must have known  that I had covered most of that ground in the fifth grade and I was already into my third year of high school when I celebrated my thirteenth birthday.

As a seasoned educator, Mom would have had to know that much of the information in this new book was old news to me, so she must have had some other reason but I thought nothing more of it at that time.

More than 25 years later, it finally dawned on me that the answer had been staring me in the face the whole time.