Oddly Encouraging

A while back, I had a pretty bad day. I made mistakes, I got angry at myself, and I behaved badly. It wasn't one of my prouder moments. But still, despite all that, that day was oddly encouraging.

Satan attacks our weak points. He always tries to capitalize on the vices that we are most vulnerable to. My tendency to get frustrated and stressed out is one of my weaknesses, but it isn't usually my greatest weakness. There's another weakness I struggle with, and Satan attacks that one more often than any other, but when he attacked my frustration the other day, I realized that I was doing something right. If my impatience and self-hatred were my greatest weakness at that point, that meant that my other weakness, which I have been working on reducing, wasn't my biggest weakness at that time. That meant that I was making progress. Strangely, the fact that Satan was trying (and, unfortunately, succeeding) to make me angry was oddly encouraging.

I had another oddly encouraging day today. Today was another bad day, but for a different reason, yet I managed not to get mad at myself or anyone else. I didn't get stressed out or frustrated. I simply dealt with the issue, brushed myself off, and moved on. And the fact that I was able to do that today is oddly encouraging. I made some mistakes today, but I managed not to get angry at myself or anyone else about it.

One day, I hope to have both of these weaknesses under such good control that Satan attacks me in a way that I don't expect, exposing a third weakness, because that'll be oddly satisfying, too. It would be nice to have my two greatest weaknesses covered so well that Satan has to resort to attacking what is currently my third-greatest weakness, then my fourth, and so on. I ultimately hope that I will one day have all of my weak points covered perfectly, and thus be completely immune to temptation. In the meantime, I'm happy to keep focusing on my two biggest weaknesses until they aren't my two biggest weaknesses anymore, and I'll consider it oddly encouraging when I manage to make a noticeable amount of progress on either one of them.