Little things

I’m often amazed at how slight an event or word it can take to change the entire tone of a day. Maybe I’m just the moody sort but I can be grinding along with my mind digging mental trenches of a certain length and depth, when I open an email or leaf through a book or someone speaks a word, and suddenly there’s a new light about me. I realize again that life is good, bad things are never all bad and don’t last forever, and there’s hope for my sorry person yet. Conversely, a “discouraging word” has the power to accelerate my mental ditch digging until I find myself wiping the sweat of hell’s heat from my furrowed brow as I bewail the damnable difficulties of life and wonder how I’ll ever make it through. Maybe in my case it is simply temperamental moodiness, but it is an internal reality I have to deal with and I’m sure I’m not the only one who struggles in this way. I know all too well how far the ripples spread from a small stone skipped across a lake. If I’m producing ripples, I’d like them to be of the encouraging, inspiring, and comforting variety, not readily evoked perhaps as a great event in the recipient's life or likely to win me any medals for heroism but still, of the nature that I won’t have to look back upon my way in this world with regret. We moody types often wrestle with this regret thing as a matter of course. I try hard to mind what I say and how I treat people and the Golden Rule. I’m not always successful and there are days when I’m painfully aware of the bleed-through of my moods and attitudes into my behavior toward others. I don’t like this at all. I’ve made some degree of progress over the years. The aging process alone does mellow an individual, whetting a more patient tolerance with the stone of experience, but I’d like to become proactive in the process, to seek out ways to bring more light to the worlds of others and to spread some of that Christmas joy everyone at least talks about for those fleeting three or four weeks during the year. I’d like to learn to more consistently do this during the ordinary, tedious, mundane times of my life when it seems to count for more and is more difficult to maintain.

So that’s one New Year’s resolution for my list, one I know I’ll need huge helpings of grace to be able to keep. Fortunately, we have a secure promise of grace for such things. God knew better than to leave us to our own devices on that one.

Peace on earth and good will to you all.

Carol