People Pushing Your Buttons?
A man known for his terrible temper blamed the world around him for his anger. If he could only associate with people as righteous as himself then he’d be OK. He forsook all and entered a monastery. Soon the monks made him mad too. He left them and made himself a home in a cave far from any human habitation.
Every morning he would go down to a nearby stream to bathe and bring a jug of fresh water back “homeâ€. One day the jug slipped from the moss covered rock he set it on and floated downstream. He recovered the jug and placed it back on the rock and it slipped into the stream again and again. The irritable hermit dared the jug to move again and slammed it down—of course, it shattered.
Maybe he should have gotten plastic. Instead he got realistic. He finally saw that his problem was not with the world around him, but the world within. (Adapted from E.J. Waggoner’s The Glad Tidings, pp. 12-13.)