I will never be a saint, I think, because I lack sufficient love of or patience with humanity.

(Also, it seems that these days you need to have been Catholic to be a "saint" in the traditional sense, but that seems less a stumbling block than what I stated above).

A window got broken tonight at Youth Group. I am trying to phrase it in the dreaded passive tense to make it seem as neutral as possible.

Now, granted, it WAS an accident. And it was a small window, and (thank God for small favors) not one of the 100+ year old stained-glass ones (it was a bathroom window, probably circa 1965, plain clear glass).

But still. Given what happened back in August, I feel like I've been treading on thin ice. I had felt like people had maybe just begun to forget the previous problems, that I'd not be hauled into any more "Surprise! It's YOUR fault!" meetings where I didn't know the meeting topic ahead of time (and thus was completely, utterly, 100% emotionally unprepared and unable to deal).

So I kind of borderline lost it. I got very quiet and very sharp and didn't talk much. I emphasized that it was a BIG problem. That we had to do something to fix it, and to do more than just tape a cardboard over the broken window and go "sorry." I proposed that I make a run to Lowe's and buy something (I was even, at that point, thinking, "Maybe I could get a new piece of glass and the kids and I could figure out how to replace it").

Instead, my co-leader called her husband, who came down and taped a chunk of heavy tarp over the window. And the father of one of the tiny kids (the Beloved Tiny Kids. I'm coming to think that children are not unlike kittens: people love them, think they're incredibly cute, and will forgive them a lot of stuff when they're tiny, but once they get sort of half grown and teenagerish, a lot of people are like, "eh, you're not cute any more, I'm done with you") said he'd call a glass company tomorrow and pay for the window (no, it was not his kid responsible). I had already said either I'd pay, or we could take it out of the Trip Fund (which seems to me the best solution: it was the kids' doing, if they suffer a little for it, fine).

At any rate. I hope that no one has anything to say about it but I fear they will. Which is where my limitation on my ability to love and be patient with my fellow humans comes in. I'm doing my damnedest and it irritates me to hear that it's somehow not good enough. And yet at the same time I feel I shouldn't be irritated, I should be able to be over that, but I am.

Part of the problem is that I'm coming to realize that I tend to let people bully me. I am very deferential, especially to people I regard as my elders or as having some sort of "authority," but I never see myself particularly as the authority. So I'm not good at responding to someone telling me "You're doing it wrong!" or "You need to..." or things like that. Or the old "I'm gonna talk and you're gonna listen" bit.

I don't know what to do to change that. I don't know, given my personality (the biggest conflict-avoider you ever saw), if it's possible for me to change that. I just would like it to stop. Especially when I'm doing my dang level best and someone thinks I should be doing it better, or more, or differently, and yet they can't seem to be bothered to actually, you know, HELP doing it.


Of course, if I WERE an actual saint, I wouldn't be troubled by that, I'd be able to see past the bullying and love the person. But I find it really hard - perhaps impossible - to love someone at the exact moment that they're telling me how I need to try harder or be better or something like that.

I've decided to call as early as possible tomorrow morning to inform and placate and let it be known it's being taken care of.

And if anyone has a major problem with this, like another surprise-meeting generating problem, I'm just going to tell them that obviously I am not doing a good enough job and they need to find someone else. I hate that, but I'm sick of this getting-grey-hairs every time I find out someone tipped over their soft drink and didn't clean it up.

At any rate. I came home this evening and picked up a skein of yarn and thought (and yeah, this is where I go a little Rain-Man-y) that one of the reasons I love yarn and fabric and floss and all that is that it's predictable. I can control it. It doesn't do horrible unexpected things that spiral out of control. And even if it DID, I could just cut out the bad part and move on.

But people, not so much. I'm bad at predicting what they are going to do. I'm bad at dealing with attitudes and criticism and general crankiness. I'm bad at sitting and letting stuff roll off me and saying to myself, "they just need to vent. they just need to vent." and not feeling like I have somehow failed horribly.

For about 8-10 months, when I was in grad school - back when everyone still had .sig lines on their e-mail and it was still the fashion to be clever and have some kind of quotation or little picture in there, I used to have a Japanese proverb I heard somewhere: "Fall down seven times, get up eight." A lot of my friends were kind of "wha?" about it but my interpretation was this: you get knocked down seven times, but you get up eight - in other words, you get up one more time than you get knocked down.

Maybe this broken window is just the seventh time of getting knocked down. (I hope that's it and not the beginning of the "Fail Triumphantly" that I posted about earlier).