I'm a Big Girl Now

...or am I? As I clashed with my daughter this week, I realized she looks like an adult and usually sounds like an adult...but sometimes acts like a child. And she has a mom (me!), who looks like an adult and usually sounds like an adult...but sometimes acts like a child. And when both of us are in child-mode at the same time, it's not pretty.

We know where the hot buttons are, and we press them...and get our own buttons pressed, too. It's like sitting in a dunk tank. You know you're in there and you know you're going to get dunked, but you don't get out. You just watch that big red button get pressed and down you go into the water. Predictable, yet startling.

When do your hot buttons get pressed? Think of the following areas of your life and jot down people or situations that put you in a dunk tank:
  • family
  • work
  • church
  • volunteer organizations
  • sports teams

Now look at that list and be honest. Is it possible you're doing some button-pushing of your own with people in those situations? Circle them.

It would be easy to say, "I'm a victim. I have no control over this situation. They make me respond this way. They don't like me. They make my life miserable." But the truth is you have a choice to get out of the dunk tank, just as you have a choice to stop pressing the dunk tank button.

But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless. When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. - 1 Corinthians 13:10-12 (NLT)

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