Putting us to the test

I think that God does challenge us from time to time. In a recent blog I wrote an expose on the Love Chapter in 1 Corinthians. Day by day I discussed the attributes of love. The first two discussed were "Love is patient and love is kind." I focused on these for several days and felt that I had progressed in these areas of my life. This brings us to the past two days.....

First my desktop computer at work crashed and burned. All of my spreadsheets, emails, etc. were lost (for now) we are trying to recover them from the hard drive. So I brought my laptop from home so that I could do my work from the office. This presented a major challenge as the IT guys spent the better part of a day reconfiguring my laptop so that it would match up with our system at work. I patiently waited on these wizards to do their thing and finally it was up and running. I am still patient. Then today my desktop with a new hard drive is online again. But my entire contact list is lost so I am slowly rebuilding it. I had to go back through all of my favorites list and locate them on the web and resave them etc. So things are going ok.

Now to the test of my patience and kindness. I arrive back home with my laptop and find that my wireless service does not work. In reconfiguring my laptop at work I lost everything at home. So it is time to call the dreaded help line of my wireless provider. Of course I am put on hold for over 15 minutes and finally hang up in frustration. I call back and ask for a connection to a live person. About this time I am reminded by the Lord that Love is patient and love is kind. I finally connect with a person and of course he is not a clear speaking American person. I have no idea where he is located but he speaks with an accent that makes it difficult to understand. I patiently explain my problem and he tells me that I must go to my modem and connect a yellow cable to my laptop in order for him to diagnose and solve my problem. Sounds easy but my modem is upstairs under a bed and I explain this to him in a nice soft voice. He says it is the only way to solve my problem so I take my laptop, my phone, my pen and pad and head upstairs. I move the bed, locate the modem and I find no yellow cable. I have a blue cable and he tells me that something is wrong but we will give it a try. I connect the cable and it actually works.

I am going to a new paragraph now just to break the monotony of this post. Everything works as it is supposed to and the technician begins to lead me through the steps to solve the problem. He is very difficult to understand and I have to tell him nicely on several occasions that I cannot understand what he is saying. In spite of this we work through the problem and slowly, step-by-step we reconfigure my system and at last it works and I am now back on line. My normal reaction to this would have been to lose my cool and let the tech know what I think about his company, being on hold forever, etc...but God through His Word had whispered in my ear to be patient and kind.

I think that God does use circumstances to test our patience and see if we really heed His Word. I am so thankful for this little test and that I was able to go through this and realize that He is at work in my life. The great thing is that I feel that due to my patience and kindness that the problem was solved much quicker and with less stress and I made sure that this tech person knew how much I appreciated his knowledge and his help. The lesson in all of this is to realize that many of the issues we have to deal with in our lives are simply tests of our faith and our application of God's Word. So the next time you have a stressful situation think about the fact that God may have put you in this situation to test your faith.