Pulling Weeds

Yesterday afternoon, I spent another hour of my life on the phone with AT&T. This is the fourth month that I have had to call AT&T because they have yet to bill us correctly for the new phone service that we signed up for when we moved. My call time each time averages about an hour, and by the time I spoke with the fifth individual yesterday, I was absolutely livid.
I took a deep breath when the customer service rep asked me, "How can I exceed your expectations today?" and I answered, "At this point, it would exceed my expectations if you could actually fix my problem and not pass me on to yet another incompetent customer service rep." I then took another deep breath and apologized to that individual and told her I was very angry and frustrated, but that I had no right to take it out on her, and I proceeded to relay (for the fifth time that hour) my saga of interactions with AT&T over the last four months. After some time working on the problem, the rep assured me that the problem would be taken care of (where have I heard that before?), and then she proceeded to try to get me to sign up for some new AT&T service. I answered that I had no intention of signing up for anything new until the proved they could effectively offer me what was initially promised, and we ended our conversation.
When I got off the phone, I was furious. I needed some way to channel my anger, so I took on a project that I always dread, but that has been hanging over my head since September. I put on my ratty clothes and my Crocs; I dug out my gardening gloves, and I went out into the front yard to weed the front flower bed. Now, I absolutely HATE gardening (probably because I usually manage to contact poison ivy whenever I go anywhere near a flower bed). But on this day, it was exactly what I needed. As I ripped out weeds, I imagined all the incompetent customer service reps I had talked to over the past few months. I even got the shovel out to work up a particularly large and pernicious weed, and I took great delight in imagining what I could do with the phone AT&T corporation with my shovel.
About half-way through, I began to cool down and think about God. I often think of how God uses life, circumstances, etc to weed out the weeds from our own souls. I thougth about the appropriate use and funciton of anger in our lives and marveled at how easy it is to cross the line between appropriate and inappropriate expressions of anger. As the evening began to grow dark, I finished my task in a much better frame of mind, and I spent some time outside in the early evening with my husband and son who came out to keep me company.
Even now, I am on my way to Gray Center for Presbyters' Day, in which the bishop has invited all priests to come and discuss the latest flare up among the clergy that started at clergy conference this year. This whole situation has inflamed a great deal of anger in my heart, and my prayer, as I journey there, is that God may grant me a spirit of discernment and control toward the appropriate expression of my anger and frustration.
Maybe some part of that will be a reminder of my pulling weeds and the weeds in my own soul that still need to be weeded out. But I think that I've made a really good start just by leaving my shovel at home.