So Abs and I have picked up some English teaching here. The work I've picked up is with a company called Aim. Aim have three divisionsm Onsite classes (called Tink), apartment building based classes and private lessons. I work Apartments on Wednesdays, Tink on Thursdays and am likely to pick up some private lessons too, so a great place to be connected with. Anyway that's just all back ground to what I wanna say.
Part of being on this adventure we call being a Christian/following Jesus is believing that God will provide. Check out Phil 4:19. I'm in the process of changing location (from Miyakojima[M] to Nakamozu[N]), length and timing of my Wednesday classes, to somewhere closer and longer hours, so more pay :-) It was sposed to all happen last week, I'd intro'd the new teacher and said goodbye to the students, but then on the day the teacher who was taking over at M, had something come up and couldn't do it. So I got a call from Aim they asked me to cover the lesson at M. My immediate reaction was one of annoyance and frustration, how dare they dick me around like that! It meant I would earn less and have to travel further. Besides, I was watching a movie and I had to leave right then and still would be late. After some resistance, I said yes and raced there and it went well.
Anyway all that to bring me to this, I was praying yesterday, specifically about forgiveness and setting my mind to forgive whatever might come my way for the day. In that moment Jesus challenged me about my attitude when I got the phone call. Our attitude and actions are a strong testimony of our God working in us. In that case my action might have been right, but my initial attitude was wrong and the employee from Aim wore it. It wasn't his fault the new teacher couldn't make it. And the loss of the extra income didn't matter if my faith was really in God to provide.
When we encounter trouble do we have a sense of indignation rise up in us, thinking "how dare you do this to me?". Or is our response one of rolling with the punches and extending grace to the one who communicates the inconvenience (they often are not the cause). In Western society we so often demand our way, we know our rights and dammit we'll let you know. How powerful is it when we display grace to others. I don't mean that we should be walkovers or anything like that. But sometimes we sweat the small stuff far too much and damage relationships because of it. As Christians we have Good News to share with the world, they way we treat people will have a big influence on if they care about what we have to say.
I challenge us to pray as often as we can, like I did yesterday, that God would help us have an attitude of forgiveness and grace for people who make us aware of challenges.
