food for fish | encouragment
Posts tagged Culture
Good work ethics are demotivating
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Picture was taken at the central Library MAX stop downtown Portland waiting for the train home. Mobile post ahead, spelling and typo errors ahead…
I work with a lot of people, both in ministry and in my vocation. A lot of these people are fantastic hard working people, and…. well a lot are just not. Now when I say hard working I’m not talking about the work-aholics, that’s a different breed. I’m talking about people who have good work ethics, people who take on what is theirs, don’t blame shift, and look for solutions. When people opperate like this then I’m glad to work along side them, past mistakes, and help accomplish the bigger goal.
When I’m working with the type of person who is constantly blame shifting, covering up mistakes, and not looking for solutions then I begin to get frustrated. This is always a hard line to walk, because ultimately I need to walk the high road and love the person through the conflict without enabling them to live/work on in dysfunction. The issue and temptation I run into is paitience within myself to work with God and find the teachable moments.
Whether Christian or not, people are in one of these two categories, to varrying degrees of course. Living in harmony as Paul instructed the Romans is key to my walk with Jesus, so a value I live out is having a strong work ethic, working alongside others who don’t share that is frustrating, but not a license to micro manage, freak out, or ignore the issues. Nor is it the time to become demotivated and give up on humanity, it’s exactly the opposite, it’s time to act and be who I’m called to be and work in my skills and gifts.
Got grace or just truth?
33 years ago
Telling the truth about God, life, people, or just about anything, is very hard to do in a graceful way, in a way that keeps the truth of God’s character intact. I hear peers today so concerned by the church’s image, afraid to use words like “saved” and “blessing”. While I admit those words have made me cringe as well, I have also realized that people not in the know, really aren’t offended by these words, instead, my observation from co-workers have been simple questions, like “what do you mean by saved” – which opens a door.
What I’m getting at is, yes we need to communicate in a way that the most people can understand, yet we must also remember that God’s character is the most important thing to communicate. If we communicate that God is anything but what he tells us in the Bible, than we’re failing. So in our attemp to communicate on issues of homosexuality, politics, war, etc, in a graceful way, we must not leave out crucial truths, and in our attempts to communicate his truth we must not use shame.
