Humility

Pride. It is everyone's greatest enemy, or at least mine. Knowing this, I have been praying for the Lord to humble me. A dangerous prayer, for sure. And I had an interesting answer to it last night.

I was at work. Without giving many details, I work with cash and checks, but not at a bank :-) I get it ready to send to the bank. So, I am sorting and counting, counting and sorting... and I receive some checks that were all kinds of bent out of shape. Now, I do have to run checks through an encoder. A particularly tempermental encoder. These were not going to be easy to process. I get all huffy, and decide that I am going to say something about this-- it happens a lot, and really is easily avoided. Just be gentle, that's all.

I walk out to talk to the supervisor, who would then talk to the cashier. But she doesn't want to (just God setting me up). I volunteer, because, in my mind, this is no biggie. I approach the cashier, mention that it would be very helpful to me if she would be a little more gentle with her checks. She becomes defensive, she doesn't manhandle her checks like that, she doesn't know how they got that way. Her helper says the same thing...we didn't do that.

And suddenly a light turns on in my brain. Of course... they didn't do it. It was an accident... preventable, but still an accident. So I let them know what happened, and how they can help to avoid it. Then, I crawl back to my cave.

Now, to clarify. There was nothing wrong with me asking them to help me out. But my heart attitude needed adjusting, so I believe God left that light off so I could go embarass myself before He clicked it on. If I had approached the situation with a servant's heart, it would have been different. But I had a selfish attitude, a "why does this always happen? don't they know how to do this?" attitude. I was insulted, and I was going to do something about it. Instead, God did something about me :-)

The best part is that He has been molding me so much that I immediately identified what happened, and thanked Him for keeping me humble. Not so long ago, I would not have appreciated this lesson. And no way would I have been sharing it with you for your encouragement.