Blessed are the Meek

My resolution for this month is to become more meek.

My initial epiphany as I contemplated this today is that this is one area where I am more naturally strong than being poor in spirit (humble) - even though most people who know me might not believe so. Meekness is too often confused with humility, but it is not being humble; that is being poor in spirit. Meekness is defined in the original Greek as "gentle, forgiving, or benevolent".

Mama will tell you that I am naturally forgiving and benevolent. My favorite definition for benevolent is the last one from the link just provided:

1.	intending or showing kindness;
2.	showing or motivated by sympathy and understanding and generosity;
3.	generous in providing aid to others
4.	generous in assistance to the poor

So, being meek is NOT being humble; rather, it is being gentle, forgiving and kindly generous. My challenge this month will be to continue to be forgiving and generous, but I will need to look for opportunities to be gentle - probably most notably in my words and the control of my tongue. (I also will need to focus on how I respond to my children.) I have a naturally sarcastic sense of humor; I am a natural tease; often I have crossed the line between harmless banter and cutting comments. I never mean them to be hurtful, but I am not always gentle, so this will be of particular importance this month.

As an aside, I hope I will not have to practice being forgiving to a much larger degree than normal - since I do not pray for opportunities to be in a situation where I need to forgive. I don't feel right about praying that others do things that require forgiveness simply to learn to do it better, so I can't bring myself to ask for more opportunities to forgive. Perhaps an acceptable alternative is to pray for the ability to see where forgiveness is required and the ability simply to do so more quickly and immediately.