How to Build Maturity in Tough Situations

It’s the middle of the day and I find myself on my phone. I can feel my heart rate increasing, my jaw tightening and my emotions releasing; I am in the middle of losing it and there’s nothing I can do about it. The conversation ends with no goodbye’s…

My day job puts me in the position of coordinating with many different people on many various issues. There are some new people I come into contact with that I have no problem with and then there are those that God puts in front of me to test my emotions, maturity and self-control. This phone call was one of those moments that would test me.

And I failed – miserably. Heightened by the many other frustrations of the day, and the numerous passes given to this one individual in the past, I had reached my breaking point. I know these are terrible excuses, but they were all I had.

NOW THAT I LOST IT, I NEED TO ACCEPT IT

Accepting and understanding the failure of myself in these type of moments is critical. Maturity has taught me to fight against these moments, but it has also taught me to resolve these moments if they do occur. I spent the rest of the day doing my work, but fighting with myself on how accept what I had done.

I knew that even though they had not done what I had asked, I had to be the Light. I knew I needed to reflect Christ in my next encounter with him. This would not be easy.

The next day came quicker than normal and I knew my encounter with him was coming. My demeanor was calmer and my spirit was corrected. I approached him with a respectful tone, apologized for my actions and we moved on. Each conversation after this one was handled better by both of us. I was fortunate that my disrespect towards him was able to teach me about respect. God has his ways…

MOVING ON AND LEARNING

This is just a small example of the many tough situations we all face each day and week. I think you could agree that there are those people you can easily get along with and there are others that you can’t. I feel like God put’s both type of those people around us to teach us different things in different ways. We may not like God’s methods, but I can say from experience that they do work.

Maturity, self-control, courage and fear. All of these traits played a big part of this little story. They also became more refined because of the experience.

Each day you have a choice – you can either lose it and hang on to it or you can lose it, accept it and move on. You have the choice to swallow your pride and learn from things like this. I was immature in my actions, but I was mature in my follow-up. In my opinion, maturity should have been stressed more at the beginning but it sometimes takes a bigger man to follow-up and express respect and forgiveness.

Either way, we must represent Christ in all our actions each and every day. If we can do it in the heat of the moment, we must. But if we can’t, we have to learn how to follow-up.

If you’re going to lose it, learn to accept it and learn to move on. Oh, and don’t stop praying about it.