Perspective

This week started off with a bang. My 12 month old son aspirated a peanut (brother and sister were eating trail mix and dropped some on the floor). He has a partially collapsed lung. He chewed it up enough that its too small and too far down in his lungs to take it out. Which puts him at a huge risk for pneumonia. He literally sounds like he has a whistle in his lungs. Being worried for my baby's health has put a few things in perspective.
As I thought about my son, the lame stuff that had gone on earlier that day didn't matter. The sibling fighting, the disobedience, whether or not my house was clean. I didn't care. All I wanted was to hold my baby tight and have him be okay.  Experiences like this make the unimportant stuff melt away.
Which is what I want to talk about. We get caught up sometimes in the unimportant. Is it annoying that your spouse doesn't put his socks in the dirty clothes bin, maybe you don't like the way they drive, or the TV shows they like to watch. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter. Let it go. Your response is your choice.
Elder Lynn Roberts gave a talk entitled, "Agency and Anger. He said,  "A cunning part of [satan's] strategy is to dissociate anger from agency, making us believe that we are victims of an emotion that we cannot control. We hear, “I lost my temper.” Losing one’s temper is an interesting choice of words that has become a widely used idiom. To “lose something” implies “not meaning to,” “accidental,” “involuntary,” “not responsible”—careless perhaps but “not responsible.“He made me mad.” This is another phrase we hear, also implying lack of control or agency. This is a myth that must be debunked. No one makes us mad. Others don’t make us angry. There is no force involved. Becoming angry is a conscious choice, a decision; therefore, we can make the choice not to become angry. We choose!"

Choose to let it go, choose to not get angry, choose to find the good instead of the bad. Walk away from the socks or better yet, just put them in the dirty clothes bin yourself.  Spend that time with the the ones you love and never take them for granted because we may not always have them with us.  I guarantee if your spouse was gone, you'd give anything to have those dirty socks on the floor again. That's my advice to you this week. This week when I saw all too closely how fragile life is, I didn't think of all the things I was frustrated about. I thought about all the wonderful things I loved about my baby. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a tiny person who I am going to snuggle closely and thank my lucky stars I can still do that.