Rubik's cube: A turn for the best

My daughter (B) is growing up.  It's been sneaking up on me, but it is really happening.  I register her for Junior High School next week.  Her days of preschool are long gone.  She has started going to Young Women's.  I swear I was just dropping her off at nursery.  One of her favorite things to do is curling up and reading a really good book, not sitting on the floor with a bucket of toys.  Where has the time gone?  Of all these accomplishments and milestones, however, today was one of my favorites.

A little background first.  B and K decided to buy Rubik's cubes at the dollar store over the holidays.  After the initial scrambling, they were really frustrated that they couldn't get it back together.  They were even more disgruntled when I told them that I couldn't fix it.  I had absolutely no clue how to fix a Rubik's cube.  When my husband got home, he turned to the best solution out there--YouTube.  He spent over an hour on a 15-minute tutorial teaching him how to solve the Rubik's cube.  He was their hero when he figured it out.  The girls spent hours over the next couple of weeks trying to figure it out until they had completely mastered it.  Ever since then, B often has her Rubik's cube around.

Today, she took it to school with her and when she got home, she showed me this:

A bag filled with Rubik's cube pieces.  When I asked her what happened, she explained it to me.  She had it with her as she was doing her hall monitor duty.  She left it on a chair and one of those slightly frustrating, trouble-causing boys came down the hall and grabbed her Rubik's cube off the chair.  He played with it for a minute, turned around, and tossed it back to B.  She didn't quite catch it.  It fell to the ground and shattered. 

B had a few different emotions go through her mind at the time.  At first, she was really mad at the boy, then she thought she would go tell her teacher, then she thought some more.  A realization came to her.  Yes, the boy shouldn't have picked up her Rubik's cube.  Yes, he shouldn't have thrown it to her.  Yes, she could go tell her teacher, and yes, he might get in trouble.  But...B had brought the Rubik's cube to school.  She was the one who didn't quite catch it when it was tossed to her, and tattling to a teacher really wasn't going to solve the situation.

 

In this moment, in a mom's eyes, she squared her shoulders, gathered the pieces, and realized that she was bigger than that.  She didn't yell at the boy.  She didn't tell her teacher.  She turned the other cheek as our Savior has told us to do so many times.  She was forgiving.  She knew that she might be able to fix it and even if she couldn't, it wasn't worth getting mad at someone for.  I know she's probably grown 1/2 inch in the last few months, but today, she grew 2 feet taller to me.  I love you B.  Thanks for being such a good example to us all.