A little more than a week ago we arrived in Estonia to start our last month on the race. Every time we talk about any part of the race it seems like it only happened yesterday, so it’s hard to believe that we are in our final month. But it’s true and we get to spend that last month in the beautiful town of Parnu, Estonia.
Our contacts for this month have multiple ministries that they are currently running, but our primary service to them is at their secondhand store. We are helping them by fixing up a couple of rooms in the building that the store is in. So we are painting, plastering, fixing a ceiling and organizing storage rooms. The rooms that we are fixing are going to be used for small group meetings, worship, and even doing music recordings. But that’s not all that we’re doing, on some nights we go to house church meetings and spend time with the people there.
This is the first time on the race that our primary ministry has been manual labor. Originally, it is not something that I at all wanted to do on the race. However, there is something about doing manual labor that is satisfying, especially when you know how it will help the ministry that you are working with. And at this point in the journey, it is somewhat of a relief and I am enjoying it.
Still, there is something that I have been noticing while doing this kind of work; it can make me very irritable and very impatient with people and I’m not entirely sure why. Come to think of it, these are the kinds of things that I was doing before the race and they, in many ways, had the same effect on me.
So what’s the deal? Why does this happen when I’m doing construction related projects?
I’ve been asking God for help and He revealed something to me. It was earlier today that I was trying to fix the ceiling and there was a problem with some of the new pieces of hardware we had just bought. I knew how to fix it but I couldn’t because I didn’t have the tools to do so. All of the sudden I was full of anger, so much so that I was angry about ten other things that either were not happening or had never happened or about things that there was no reason at all to be angry.
Why did that little thing set me off my hinges? Because I had to accept that I was not in control. We like to be in control of what’s going on around us and most of the time we think that we are. There are even some areas in which we think we have more control than in others. But the truth is that we are not always in control and when we are it is a gift from God. This can be a very unsettling thing to come to terms with and can be triggered from even the smallest things. For me it was triggered from something as simple as not having the right tools and then extended to all sorts of other things, leaving me angry at anything and everything for no reason. This is probably not the only factor in my irritability, but at least God has given me something to work with. Take all of the things you think you can control, even the smallest things, and lay them at His feet. After all, that's where it was supposed to be.
