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As I sat in the terminal waiting for our delayed connecting flight on the last leg of our trip, I felt angry that so many people (my husband and me included) had been so grossly inconvenienced. Our airline tickets hadn’t been cheap, and we should have been treated much better – in fact, catered to – for the price that we had shelled out to travel by plane. The airline should have been more organized, planned ahead for potential delays and bad weather, the planes should have been cleaner, the airport food should have been cheaper, and the flight attendants shouldn’t have been so snippy. After all, we were the customer, and the customer is always right.

Looking at it from a better point of view, we should have been happy that we could afford to fly home for Christmas at all. With how tight money had been that year, those airline tickets were a minor miracle. As for the airline – who knows why everything was so chaotic. They were probably just overloaded. Lord knows that when I was in the working world, I would have practically given an arm and a leg for someone – anyone – to be empathetic on one of MY bad days.

That’s how we roll. We always have a choice. We can save our happiness and charitable feelings for the times when outside conditions are nothing less than optimal. Or, we can make the best of a bad situation and learn something of eternal value. Like Padre Pio taught, we can offer up our inconvenience and irritability for the souls in Purgatory. Then, our trials are turned to gold.

 

“Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

 

[1 Thessalonians 5:18]