So I hit a slump. Yeah, thats right. The guy serving as a missionary for almost a year isn’t perfect. I also hit it hard. But it was one of those times where you just kind of look back after you’ve gone through it and gone “What was that even about?”. I realized that I was picking out the smallest imperfections in people and letting them ruin my day. Question mark?
Also, I refused to talk to anyone about this so I took the little pebbles of anger and built the Great Wall of China. (Or Squidwards snow fort. Whichever way you want to look at it.)
Point is, I overcame this. I was reading a book and at the end of a chapter it asked you to look for the gold in somebody each day. He used the example that he was cleaning out his closet and had an old pair of beat up basketball shorts he needed to throw away. He took one last look at the bag of trash he had and realized there was a $100 bill seeping out of one of the pockets.
This challenged me to everyday, no matter how mad someone may be making me, not matter how terrible the situation is, no matter that the cops kicked us off a bus because we were white and didn’t have our passports (which actually could have ended up pretty terribly), find the gold that’s probably sitting in plain sight.
I’ll leave you with this. The other day was a long day for me. I was struggling with people making me angry and I had allowed it to put me in an bad mood. And to top this off, I thought we were going straight back home so I could take a shower and get a nap, and now we had to go grocery shopping and walk all the way to the bus stop (So terrible right? Food and transportation. Go me.).
A fellow racer named Hunter and I were about to go grab our part of the grocery list when a man stopped us. In the past, people stopping us here either wanted to sell us drugs or drive us somewhere for an outrageous price, so at first I tried to ignore him. Turns out, this man was on a very long walk across the country of Botswana raising support for a ministry. We began to talk about what we were doing as missionaries, what he and his church were given the opportunity to do, and it was just a “Thanks God” moment because it instantly lifted my spirits and put me in a better mood.
The gold you so desperately need one day could be waiting in the middle of a grocery store right in front of you, so don’t let your selfishness keep you away from it.
