hoarder

"He made me mad!" "This just ruined my whole day!" "They're making me crazy!"

Man, am I gonna bust my own chops here! 
We use phrases like these a lot in our culture. Its a way of passing off the responsibility of self-management to someone or something else.

But we have this flesh, this human nature, and with that comes anger and hurt, sorrow and frustration, all the realm of emotion is already there inside of us. The good. The bad. The ugly.

That anger you felt when you were cut-off in traffic yesterday? That jerko driver didn't cause it. It was already there. He just revealed it to you.

Maybe its just me here, but its like there's this switch in my brain. I get angry. Or frustrated. Or overwhelmed. And I hold on to it. I throw out blame like playing darts, trying my best to hit the bulls-eye. When really, all I gotta do is . . . let go. Flip the switch.

Its a simple thing. It's a surrender. Its a willingness to except that this emotion, this anger, its mine. Its mine to deal with. Someone or something may have triggered it, but I've kept the fire stoked myself. And although its simple to do, most people choose to hold onto everything. Hoarders of emotional crap.

And that's me. I'm a hoarder. I let myself worry. And stress. The past few weeks of work have been rough. Very rough. And I reached a point of exhaustion. I just dreaded going in. But last night I realized that instead of choosing my attitude, I simply chose to blame the circumstances for my state of mind. And I accepted it as so. But after hearing "What's wrong? Are you okay?" last night from three different people, well, I realized how lame I was being.

So I reclaimed control of myself. I took ownership for myself and my emotions. And today was a whole new day. The circumstances? One of my kids tried to strangle himself with his shoe strings. Another one went AWOL. Another hallucinated and thought the devil was trying to kill him, etc.

But I chose my attitude. I surrendered to peace. I relied on God. My day? Despite all, it was great.

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