An Overflow

For my class "Helping Relationships" I had to answer the question: Can you think of a specific example of how your relationship with Jesus overflows into daily life?"

Yesterday at work, I was in short supply of patience because of my long to-do list before our high school’s spring trip.  One student was having visa troubles, so I offered to send her a scanned copy of her plane ticket receipt to hopefully speed along the process.  This should be a five-minute job, and I was happy to do it, even though it wasn’t a foreseen issue.  I had given the finance department advance notice to retrieve the receipt, but to my dismay, when I returned to their office later in the morning, it had not been found.  In China, the way to store receipts is to glue them together into a booklet for for efficient storage.  Unfortunately, these plane ticket receipts were glued where the students’ names had been printed.  So, I offered to find the receipt instead.  I sat down and attempted to separate each of the 50 receipts of the booklet in order to locate the names of my students.  My to-do list rang in my head like the morning alarm, or maybe more like a fire alarm.  In addition to my list and the receipt issue was the need to connect with one of the students who was particularly emotional that day.  After fifteen minutes of separating receipts, I found the one I needed, and tried to remove it without tearing it.  This was impossible.  My heart turned ugly fairly quickly towards the Chinese way of storing financial information and then to general Chinese culture.  My thoughts expanded to various other things that I dislike and don’t understand about this country.   I tore the receipt more than I hoped for, which became the last straw to my unraveling patience.

In that moment, my relationship with Jesus saved me from my own anger, impatience, and prejudice.  There were ugly words on the tip of my tongue, of which the Holy Spirit immediately convicted me.  I am incredibly thankful for God’s grace for me as a sinner, and I want to become quicker to apply that grace to those in my life and to the culture around me.  

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