The Right Thing to Do

Having a fifteen-year-old daughter certainly can be trying. It is hard to be patient with a girl who yells and gets angry at every little thing. At dinner she will get mad at her sister for looking at her.

“Don’t start, girls,” I say.

“What? Don’t even talk to me!” She storms out of the room.

I have tried to keep disagreements and discussions calm, but my daughter fumes and yells. I turn to my husband for support. “I didn’t even raise my voice,” I say. “Why is she yelling at me?”

“Because she’s not used to you not yelling at her,” he says.

He’s right. I’ve spent a lot of years yelling and reacting on my emotions and feelings instead of doing what is right. This is going to be a hard journey. It will surely take a lot of patience to ignore my feelings and emotions and do the right thing.

How do we know what is the right thing to do? This is something I have to ask myself often.

Recently when my husband was away visiting his family in Prince Edward Island he called and told me he found a great house for sale. It had originally been listed at $150,000 but the woman was so eager to sell she dropped her asking price to $69,000. I know my husband was thinking about future retirement, but does he realize that is at least 20 years away? He gushed on about this two bedroom home right in the village. I didn’t want to hear it. We had been fortunate to receive some extra money; I didn’t want to go back to struggling financially. I didn’t want to commit to a life down there. I kept telling him it wasn’t fair for him to even consider it when he was down there and I was up here.

Granted, it’s a great investment if we could rent it out but we still have 2 years left on the mortgage of our home. Did we really need the burden of a second home? Would we have to furnish the house too? He wanted to be able to have a place to stay when we visited in the summer. That would mean summer vacations that would consist of 18-hour drives and a month away from home instead of a 2-hour plane ride and a much shorter vacation.

When my husband returned from his vacation I looked at the house on the internet. Although it had a beautiful, large kitchen it only had two bedrooms – bedrooms that were not shown on the website. The description boasted of a beautiful pine sunroom but showed no photo. What were they not showing in the pictures? He said we wouldn’t live there now; we would rent it out and then have it for our retirement. And where would our kids stay when they visited with their kids in that small 2-bedroom house? And who would want to rent it if they could buy it for a measly $69,000?

Was I being selfish? Was he? The question remains, what is the right thing to do?
I decided to follow up with the realtor and requested more interior pictures. He told me there was already an offer on the house. Technically, the house was sold. Though my husband was a little disappointed, he was happy to learn later that a member of his family had purchased the house – as an investment – and we are welcome to stay there anytime we visit.

The right thing to do was not get upset. The circumstances weren’t upsetting me; I was upsetting myself. It did me no good to fight something that could have been beneficial. I wouldn’t know until I investigated further. Purchasing the house might have been the right thing to do but I feel that the fact that it was sold before we could investigate further meant that it was not the right thing to do – not now.

You know getting angry and upset about something that has already occurred does nothing but make you ill. You cannot un-ring a bell. Either accept what has happened and learn from it, or find a way to fix it.

I believe all things happen for a reason. If we get upset and rant and rave about something, we cannot hear God telling what is right. Push your feelings aside and listen. You will be told the right thing to do.

When in doubt, read the Bible.