Back from Retreat to my Old Self

Just got back from a great retreat. Heard great teachings on intimacy w/God through personal prayer times, The Lord is my Refuge, the importance of sharing my faith w/others, and surrendering to God's plans. Great time w/friends.

But now I'm back home to find that my car that's been fixed twice still doesn't work properly. And I quickly lost my temper and said things I wouldn't want anyone to hear me say.

You know, when I was a kid I would NEVER swear. I remember when I was maybe eight or nine, I went through a phase of calling my younger sister Michele "Mitch." And once someone told me they thought at first I was saying something else that rhymes w/Mitch when I talked to her. I literally felt nauseous that someone would think I had said that word. I think when I graduated from high school I could've counted on one hand the number of incidents in my life where I had said swear words, and most of them would've been when no one else could hear me. Yeah, I was an unusual child, I know, but it's a true story.

Anyway, that has changed drastically. I still do most of my swearing when no one else can hear me, but if I were trying to count how much I swear, I would soon lose track. And that scares me on some level, b/c I know that the mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart, and I don't really want that stuff to be what's in my heart.

So hear's the question. Is it better that I let those things come out my mouth b/c they showed me what was in my heart that I really needed to address? Because now saying those words is a habit, and they come MUCH more easily than they did the first times I said them. Would it have been better to never have started saying them in the first place? Because I believe their roots would still have been in my heart, they just would have manifested themselves in other things besides swearing.

Of course that's a purely academic question, b/c I can't go back and change the past. The fact is that swearing is already a habit for me. Maybe a better question is if breaking that habit would be a benefit to my spiritual health or if I should deal EXCLUSIVELY w/the roots of the plants that bring forth the outward fruit of swearing.

The heart of the matter is what's the matter in my heart. It's the unjust anger, the lack of peace and contentment, the selfishness, the pride, and no doubt a host of other things that make me want to swear when something isn't going the way I want it to or the way I think it should. The more I think about it, the more I think those are really the things I should be devoting my time & energy to dealing with. I guess the best thing would be to take those things to God and hash through them in His Presence. Why do I become angry and petulant b/c of even minor inconveniences, like a slow driver in front of me? Why do I feel a compulsion to curse myself or some inanimate object when I drop something, when my books fall out of my backpack b/c I forgot to zip it up before I swung it onto my back, or some other trifling thing happens? Why can I be just so irritable in general?

Yeah, these are definitely questions to take to God. He will have the best answers, and He is the One Who can actually the change my heart. "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old is gone; the new has come."

Funny thing is I didn't intend to write about my struggle w/swearing today. It's just what came up. Maybe that's what makes good blogging-- talking about whatever happens to come up. ;-)

Peace, y'all. Thanks for "listening."