Doing Things Twice

At times, when our children do a task with a poor attitude, we have them do it again. The Lord did this with me last week on my trip to the grocery store. We were going to have company for lunch, and I decided to take a ‘quick’ trip to the grocery store with the kids. By the time I had found stockings, shoes, hats, jackets, scarves and gloves for everyone and we had walked down the steep hill, I already had a bit of an attitude. After about 45 minutes of carefully stacking groceries around kids in the stroller, trying to keep three pairs of hands from shelves, as well as keep the noise level down we were finally standing in the check-out line. It was then that I noticed I had forgotten my wallet in the apartment. I have to admit if my attitude was not the best at the beginning of the shopping trip it was very low at this point. But what else was there to do? Since everything was in our stroller we went back through each aisle carefully placing all items back onto the shelves while the kids were loudly whining about not getting this or that. I mumbled an embarrassed excuse as I tried to squeeze the empty stroller past the lady at the checkout and back we went up the hill to our apartment.

It was at this point that the Lord gave me a chance to reflect on my tense mood. When we went to the store the second time my prayer was more for the ‘how’ of our little trip rather than the accomplishment of the task. We had such a better time. We even met the children’s new Sunday school teacher in the store as well as one of the students from the seminary. It seemed as if the children were reflecting my changed attitude and were very pleasant and helpful on our second round through the aisles. I learned a lesson. Thank you, Lord, for an opportunity to adjust my attitude.

Comments

[jenny]

Julia! So good to read some blog posts from you :). I really liked this one... hits very close to home with me these days. Are you able to email much? I wanted to send you our Christmas letter, but I didn't have your new address... pls send when you can :) Thinking of you all and praying for you... love, jenny