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Tools

Have you ever wanted to quit - maybe your job or your parenthood? Your family? Your spouse? Maybe even your life? Yeah. Me too. As a matter of fact, I've been feeling that way quite a bit lately - about my job anyway. Without going into the nitty-gritty details, the past two years have just about pushed me over the edge. I've had to force my square brain into a round hole. I've had to learn to think like a particular computer program rather than an accountant. I've never professed to be fond of computer programs. I prefer to do most of my thinking on my own. I like to problem-solve just not the kind of problem solving that has to be funneled through only one question "how does this program think?" I'd rather use my brain to actually work through the problem itself, but that's just me. And that's my problem. I'm not the boss, and I don't get to choose the type of problems I work on. I can accept my job as it is and plow through, train my square brain to think itself into a round hole or find work where my square brain has a square hole into which it fits.

Maybe you're like me - I tend to take life as it comes. If I encounter an obstacle, I walk around it or over it, but to walk right down the middle of it? That's not going to happen. I'd rather change me and my "stuff" than to suggest that anything or anyone else change. After all, it's my can of worms. Why should you have to eat any of it? I'll just get out of the way and everything will be fine . . .You know what the trouble is with that thinking? I've taken relationships, people, out of the equation.

This computer program that is the round hole to my square brain is just a tool. I see that now. It's one of the millions of tools that God uses in my life. Where I see tasks, and goals, and responsibilities, He sees opportunity for relationship, opportunity for me to work with others, opportunity to jump head first into the problem and find a solution together. It's an opportunity for God to chip away at the rough wood of who I am so that Christ can more easily be seen in me - like a craftsman who takes the limb of a tree and bit by bit whittles away the bark and the wood to expose a masterpiece that he could see hidden within it all along.

So what's going on in your life? What tool is God using on you these days? I'm not very good at this, but maybe we can encourage each other to look past the tool to the hand that holds it and from there into the loving eyes of the Master craftsman who wields His tools in our lives with such amazing love and compassion. 

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