Swirling around in my head for the last couple of weeks has been a situation that I’m not certain I handled correctly. At the time, I felt as though I were exercising great humility, restraint and passivity. None of these three come particularly easy for me so you can imagine my great satisfaction with myself… See? I told you that humility doesn’t come easy 🙂
The details don’t really matter. The bottom line does. I allowed someone to make me feel like I needed to absorb their anger for the actions of a third party. My involvement was benign. My actions had nothing to do with why this person was so full of anger and hurt but because she can’t communicate with the third party, I got it right between the eyes. After all, she had to blame someone and I was willing to take the fall.
Well, that was then. This is now. Today, I believe that I should have remained respectful while telling her that she should deal directly with her offender. I believe I should have gotten up, thanked her for her time and told her I will pray that she finds relief from the anger and hurt she carries around.
The truth is that I didn’t do any of those things because I felt a little ambushed and the be-a-good-Christian-sister idea was being pointed at me with both barrels. So I did it. I sat there and listened to the complaints of all this third party has done and is doing to her and nodded when appropriate and shook my head when called for. It wasn’t until the days that followed that I realized….this had nothing to do with me. One could easily argue that my involvement didn’t amount to “a hill of beans”, as my mother used to say.
So did God want me to remain humble and quiet, allowing this person to vent? I don’t know. I guess I thought maybe He did. So I was. 
Today, I’m not sure. The line between being meek and being spineless is one that is a blurry mess for me. So even though I really am searching for what the “right” thing to do was, I know that I’m having a pretty tough time swallowing the injustice of how it went down…so humility, restraint and passivity still elude me.
Hmm. Sounds like you did the right thing and now the enemy is making you question it. Whatever it was that you wished you would have said, she probably realized after the smoke cleared.
Amy, you were so right about parallel posts! Wow. It sounds like you are doing the right kind of processing. So proud of you, friend. Tough stuff. Hugs, Heather