Not so thrilling thrill of discovery.

I've discovered something this week. And, as you might guess from my title, it wasn't a very good discovery. You think, because you have a good attitude, and you're a generally happy person that you must be doing something right. Right? But then when it's tested, life goes sour, things are bad...that's when you find out what's really inside you. My brother called yesterday and implied that he figured yesterday would of been a bad day for me since he'd found out my nephew got sick while riding in my car. He knew, thanks to the blog here, that the day before that had been horrible, but he thought that maybe with my nephew throwing up that yesterday was bad too. But, honestly, that didn't even register on my scales. I just felt sorry for my nephew and his apparently 'inherited' weak stomach. And that's when I realized, I don't necessarily have a better attitude than others (Pride of course told me that I was superior at least in this area). The only thing that makes me different is I have different triggers. And apparently those triggers just hadn't been pushed lately, until this past week. So, that makes me wonder. I mean, until you're tested, you really don' t know where you're at on the learning scale. Without tests at school you wouldn't realize where you need to improve. So the same would easily apply to this Christian walk. :) So, despite how hard this past week was, and how much I would like a little break to recover from this most recent test, I hope God sees fit to test me again. I don't feel I did very well, and I want to do better. It's worth this pain and frustration just to GROW. I don't want to hit this again next year and find out I haven't changed at all. I hope I've learned something through this, and I hope you have too. Sometimes you read something someone has written and you get an opinion about them. I don't know what your opinion of me is, but ask yourself, did it change the last few days when I struggled? I received a story in the e-mail just this morning about a man that wanted to teach his 4 sons something so he sent them all out to look at a tree. He sent one in the fall, one in the winter, one in the spring and one in the summer. Each son came back with a different report on the tree and the trees potential. Obviously, the sons that saw it in the fall and winter didn't think much of the tree. But, it takes those seasons to be able to get to the most from the spring and summer seasons. I hope this analogy made sense. If it didn't, I'll give you the e-mail of the lady that sent me the story. Ask her what it means. :) Because I'm going to go wrap Christmas presents. :)