Ladies of Grace 08 19 2009

Time for Week 3 of Ladies of Grace over at my pal Beth's blog. I really thought about this a lot this past week and tried to apply it to my interactions on a regular basis. I've noticed a difference in my patience level while out and about shopping and just running errands.

This week's experience happened at a gas station in Rogers while we were running errands on our way to our sister-in-law's parents' house. When the Powerball reaches over $200 million I will sometimes buy a dream for $1. I'm don't really do it often just because I don't really get the opportunity to go into gas stations very often because the kids are usually with.

But on Saturday Jake made a quick pit stop and I went in to buy a piece of a dream. I walked into the store and got directly into line. There was one person checking people out while another woman was doing something with a computer behind the counter. As soon as she was done there was a line of three of us. One person checking out, a woman waiting in front of me and then me. The woman did the standard, "I can help whoever is next." And as the woman in front of me was trying to step over a guy cut through our line and booked it over to the newly opened line. He showed us his one candy bar (almost like it was ok because he just had that) and checked out. I just kind of shrugged my shoulders. If he was in that big of a hurry, let him be, I didn't really care at that point. And I was kind of shocked by this reaction. Normally I would have been indignant and made some loud comment about how rude it was.

The woman in front of me got helped and I went over to the other woman who had checked out the candy bar guy. As he was walking away she asked, "Did he just cut in front of you two in line?" I responded, "Yeah, but I don't really care. I'm not in that big of a hurry." And she said (loudly, as he was walking out of the store), "Yeah, but that's just rude." My response was, "Yeah, I guess so." I left and we shared "Have a great days" and went our separate ways.

It just got me about how the other woman's reaction would have been mine if I hadn't been making a concious effort to be "graceful" in my every day life.