St. Patrick's Self-Improvement

I made a St. Patrick’s Day resolution today—not that my resolution was particularly Irish, but since I happened to make it today I figured there was no good reason to leave the Irish out of it.

I’ve been realizing lately that over the last couple of months, particularly since I got back from spending the holidays at home, I’ve tended to be a lot more negative and critical in my general outlook, especially with regards to work and the foibles of my co-workers (especially João’s), and that has really, really grown to bother me. It’s gotten to the point where I’m much quicker to spot errors and flaws than recognize what’s good and well-done, and I think my attitude has begun to affect my co-workers, too. And I hate it—I hate seeing that in myself, especially when for most of life I’ve prided myself on striving to be the opposite. Granted, things are pretty stressful here right now with everything that’s pushing to get finished in the next bit (the curriculum, the operational plan for our whole program), and there are a bunch of new administrators getting trained (Gil Vicente, the new program director, Solomon, the new national director for Care For Life), and lots of things start falling apart a bit both at work and in the church as João (who’s both the big dog at Care For Life and the top lay leader in the church here) feels overwhelmed and starts forgetting things, so it’s easy to feel overwhelmed sometimes and feel critical of João when I’m expected to pick up the slack, but that’s no excuse for the way I’ve used that as an excuse to focus on the negative.

Tonight was an example of that, when there was a church leadership meeting that was supposed to happen, and João canceled it at the last minute because he’s been getting really sick—something I hadn't heard about until arriving at the church after leaving another meeting early to make sure I arrived on time. Between having had to ditch what I was doing and not having enough money on me for transportation home (I was counting on riding home with João), I started getting really mad at João, for getting sick I suppose, as ridiculous as that sounds. And as I got madder and madder, I realized just how ridiculous I was being, getting mad at him for getting sick—and I thought of a talk I’d been studying today by Elder Bednar (LDS church leader), and how getting mad, or getting offended, is a choice that I was making. As much as I already understood this logically, I began to realize how much energy I was wasting on resenting and complaining, energy that wouldn’t accomplish anything good or positive or useful. I ended up walking a good part of the way home to give myself time to think and cool down (and listen to that particular talk again on my iPod—good ol’ technology, as much as I don’t love it as much as Kip does), and as I thought, I resolved to change. I realized really don’t want to waste my last few months of Mozambique stewing and stressing. So, starting today (Thanks, St. Paddy), I’m ditching the negative funk. I’m choosing to be the Rolf I want to be.