Rain is falling softly on the tin roof as I sit here in my room thinking back on the last few days. Rainy afternoons help me daydream, but today my thoughts turn to more serious matters.
It’s the end of the first work week of this new year, and I’m thankful I’m home. Not only am I thankful that I can now put the work week behind me and relax into the weekend, but I’m also thankful that I’m away from my workplace and far away from ‘negative Martha’.
Negative Martha is a chronic complainer. Not a workday goes by without her complaining about her husband, her neighbours, her neighbourhood shop, or how slow/expensive/low quality/stale/too small/too big/dull things are.
On our first day back at work, she declared that her words for this new year are ‘stupid’ and ‘idiot’ because everyone she met was either stupid or an idiot, or both. I didn’t ask her if I was one of them. That was only Friday, 2nd January. Happy New Year!
I’d often tried to be understanding and be a good listener whenever Martha complained about one thing or another, but I found her tirades particularly hard to listen to this week. Maybe because it was the same old thing from last year, and the many years before that, rinsed and repeated over and over again. Or, maybe, because it’s a brand new year and I thought that someone like her, mid-fifties, with a good job, enough savings to retire on, should by now know better. And, be better able to handle her feelings, and whatever else that troubles her.
Do you think that the words you choose, like Martha, as your ‘words of the year’, will guide the situations you find yourself in throughout the year? Will they influence how you treat people? Shape your perception of them? Shape you?
When I was thinking of a new name for my website, the name Solitary Grace was impressed upon me. I liked the descriptions associated with the name that I found online. It fitted the virtue of a quiet and gentle spirit that I was trying to cultivate in my life.
Solitary Grace is my word or words for the year. Solitary because I enjoy and thrive in solitude, in peace, and quiet. Grace, because of the free and unmerited favour God has bestowed upon us.
Knowing how God has been and is, merciful to me, one of the worst sinners I know, shouldn’t it be easy for me to be gracious toward people like Martha? Lend them my ears, as it were, and listen with a patient spirit and a prayerful heart. Not to rush in with my opinions, but to first ask God to meet them where they are.
Don’t we all, continuously, need God’s love, mercy and grace?
At one time, I was like Martha, far worse even, but God’s love found me and has kept me in His grace ever since.
And it’s His grace that continues to see me through.
Happy New Year!
Photo: Mali Maeder from Pexels