Let There Be Peace

It's the day after Thanksgiving, opening day of Shopping Season, and I'm still thankful. After cleaning yesterday, too thankful for what I have and too glad to be rid of what I don't want, to even consider adding to my personal inventory at this time! I am so thankful to not be participating in this year's Shopping Season. Oh, I do shop from time to time. I don't make everything here at the Preservation, but I celebrate simplicity and since I agree with Biblical scholars that Messiah wasn't born in December, I see no reason to participate in the mayhem. I've been here at the Preservation learning the difference between people pleasing and peace making, so clearly shopping for gifts in large crowds would not be conducive to peace as I sort out my lessons. I've had this assignment for years and thought I was getting somewhere, only to get definite negative feed back. I discovered the harder I tried, the worse it became, until I was finally at the point of thinking "Whatever it takes to get people to shut up and get off my back is what I'm willing to do." Well that worked to a point, but that just usually results in having to put up with someone having a tantrum and giving me a cussin'.
It has, however; finally hit me, and thank G-d before the preservation gathered more residents. I've been a miserable failure as a people pleaser, try as I might, but attempting to people please wasn't peacemaking. I have learned that people pleasers draw quarrelsome and critical controllers. We're like chaos magnets, and confusion sponges. We take it in, try to convert it all to something pleasant, and end up stuffing, and still not pleasing those around us. Not to mention, the boil over isn't pretty when the stuffing hits maximum capacity.
In the last year and a half, I re-edited my book 5 times, after the editor said it was ready. I changed the cover upon advisement, and every holiday gathering had to be rescheduled. As for trying to hang on to managing my new business. The only label of mine that did not get overridden, re-sized, replaced, or rewritten, was my basic soap label, and that was attempted more than once. The catalogue is changed, the product line is expanded far beyond what I set out to do, and when it's all said and done, none, absolutely none of the people I was trying to please, were pleased with me yet! And the critiques and input I asked for, it's still sitting here, untouched. To think, I gave up my own peace in an attempt to just keep jumping through hoops. I'm so thankful to have realized this, because the preservation is about to take on new residents.
People pleasing is not peacemaking. The G-d of Abraham has some interesting things to say about peace. He says if I please HIM, HE'll make even my enemies be at peace with me. Perhaps just a quiet distance is peaceful. HE says I have to love my enemies, and I love them at a quiet distance, sort of like the Rabbi's prayer for the Czar in "Fiddler on the Roof." The one thing the G-d of Abraham never said, was that we had to please people to have peace.