Happy New Year to everyone! This is my favorite holiday as I always enjoy new beginnings and today I spent it with many women that I care about in my life. But as I recall the day and ponder on the little things that revealed God in His great mystery I am humbled to see that God wants me to begin this experiment with humility.
The first lesson of humility for the day was this morning when Ryan, my oldest son, asked if I would play Super Mario Brother’s with him. Every single bit of me wanted to say ‘No’…I have never played a video game in my entire life. Yes, never. There aren’t many things I can say I’ve never done (unfortunately) but despite the amount of game systems in our house you would think this to be untrue. I remembered that I was to ‘show up’ in the day and recognized this to be a great opportunity to show my son that I wanted to spend some quality time with him, so I stopped what I was doing and learned to play.
After 30 minutes of consistently dying and losing the game Ryan was happy to let me go so I could get ready for the day. But God wasn’t done with me…later in the evening after I had my little party and all of the women left, Neal came and got me and took me into Ryan’s room where I found Ryan with his head bent in shame. I had no idea what was going on but it wasn’t good. Apparently Neal heard Ryan mutter a few ‘choice words’ while playing his game…he began to cry when Neal confronted him and said that he had heard them from us. Which I knew was true. I’m not one to curse that much but I will admit there are those times it happens and apparently as I kept dying in the game earlier that day they crossed my lips and I didn’t even realize it!
So we called a family meeting and discussed what we wanted as a family for 2010. We decided as a family that the boys would work on not calling each other names and that Neal and I would be fined a dollar every time a ‘bad word’ was said.
My lesson today? I didn’t just show up…I had to own up.
Blessings to you all!
Shannon