When You're a Grump....

Today’s A Course in Miracles lesson is about forgiveness:

Let me not forget my function.
Let me not try to substitute mine for God’s.
Let me forgive and be happy.
Lesson 64

Easy to do when I’m meditating. Not so easy when my 79-year-old very tired neighbor (with cancer!) wants my help trimming her crepe myrtles during the cool part of the day which also happens to be MY WRITING TIME! !!!!!!! when I had spent the week-end cleaning so I could WRITE THIS MORNING.

Then I’m under the crepe myrtles with a saw and clippers, and my general mode of operation is the bull-in-a-china-cabinet one anyway, and Miss F's is precise and s l o w l y methodical, and I can feel the BIG NOT FAIR chemicals surging through my frontal lobes.

Let me not forget my function.
Let me not try to substitute mine for God’s.
Let me forgive and be happy.

Let me not forget my function.
Let me not try to substitute mine for God’s.
Let me forgive and be happy.

Let me not forget my function.
Let me not try to substitute mine for God’s.
Let me forgive and be happy.

Which for me at the moment means please, while Miss F. persnicketingly chooses which twig to remove to relieve the weight that has the myrtle drooping to the grass, please, please please don’t let me me saw this fricking tree off at ground level, and don’t let me sear this unusually cool summer morning with profanity. In front of this 79-year-old very tired single woman with cancer.

Let me not try to substitute my function for God’s.

Let me forgive and be happy.

I don’t think that meant let me try to maintain. I don’t think that meant let me begrudgingly get through this task and without my g.d. irritation showing.

Do you get that chemical feeling in the front of your head, like clouds gathering before the storm? That flat desperate feeling like your brain is a fox caught in a leg trap and is fixing to start chewing until something gives? That bellwether feeling indicting your emotions are about to erupt, and you are going to be hateful, or/and you are going to burst out crying because of the unfairness of it all, and the residue will yuck up the whole day, year, the rest of your life? Because of the BIG NOT FAIRNESS OF IT ALL?

I don’t think that’s what the A Course lesson means.

I had to back up…recognize it wasn’t God’s function that I had to write this morning, at least not at that very minute if I happened to be down the street helping my neighbor. So if I was at Miss F.’s whacking on her crepe myrtle, and I wasn’t happy, there was something/somebody I wasn’t forgiving.

I had to turn the forgiveness matter over to the Holy Spirit, that’s what A Course calls it. Forgive her. Forgive me. Forgive my mother. Forgive whomever the hell needs forgiving. I’m willing. Just don’t know how. Show me God’s function for me.

And I noted the frontal lobe crap. Which began to recede.

“I don’t feel so tired,” Miss F. said after the proper branches had been sawed, the tree had been tied to fence, and the trash hauled to the street.

And I left with a bag of tomatoes, light of mind, light of heart. Happy. With enough time to write this and plenty more.

Why do I always forget what works?