Control

This past week I was feeling depressed and so wanted something really light and easy to read. I went through my moms book shelf and took two books "Christy" by Catherine Marshall and "The Shell Seekers" by someone I can't remember. I was pleasantly surprised both these books. Christy was very motivational for me (hopefully not just because I was moody and depressed!) I would suggest reading it and The Shell Seekers while light as I thought still made me think about something. In this book a mother in her old age is recounting life and also the lives of her three children. Two of the three children are absolutely horrible and I keep waiting for as in all lovely novels for them to learn their lesson and be good! They never did. I was really moody and thought I wish I could smack them and tell them how to behave. But in the book the author portrays the mother as very accepting. I realize she is not complaining about her rotten children, she is not fretting (not much anyway), and she is most definitely not trying to change them. She knows what they are like, she loves them in their own way, and just lets go of those parts of them that are distasteful. Because she does this she is much calmer then many mothers I know in my own life. Moms who worry and try to hard to influence and get angry at all their children's bad or seemingly bad choices. I thought about myself and while I have thought about being controlling before and have tried to overcome it I realized I still had a "bit" more to go. I too view people and if its someone I care about, and they are seeming to jump off a cliff I want to jump in and stop them. Does this do me any good? No because usually that means the person now really wants to jump off that cliff, and I just make them mad. I get myself upset and lose my sense of peace and usually they jump off the cliff anyway. When in truth maybe it wasn't the cliff I thought it was. Or maybe yes its a cliff but if they won't look at it for what they know it is they need to jump off it to learn a painful lesson. I know I have jumped off my painful cliffs but needed that lesson to come through experience. So my light hearted novel brought me to think about this quote that used to hang on my mothers fridge "God grant me the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to accept the things I cannot" I do not need to control things, I can trust God and have peace!