212

"Sometimes I get the feeling that the two biggest problems in America today are making ends meet and making meetings end." - Robert Orben

Yesterday, at the place where I work, we had a mandatory training. For the most part, it was five hours of my life that I can never have back. The most useful idea of the morning came in the first ten minutes. Since I don't think the concept has a copyright, I'm going to use it here.

What is 212 minus 211? One. A very small - almost insignificant - number. No big deal, right? What happens to water at 211⁰? It gets really, really, really hot. What happens at 212⁰? It boils. (For those of our friends that are more familiar with the Metric System, substitute 99 and 100 respectively.) That one degree makes a huge difference.

The idea is that there is nothing insignificant. Any number, no matter how small, is important. Significant. Vital. Worthwhile.

"If you think you're too small to make a difference, you haven't spent a night with a mosquito." - African Proverb.

Blessings and Work

A couple of weeks ago, some good friends of ours gave our family two of their old iPods. Just gave them to us. They had upgraded and wanted us to have something to load language learning stuff, or spoken word Bibles in Thai, or whatever. Music if we wanted to. It was a really cool gift and we are truly thankful.
 

Now, if only we could make them work. 

We already have a couple of MP3 players, but they’re the off-brand ones. My computer system is non-Apple. My sound files are all incompatible. So right now I have two really cool iPods and no way to load anything on that the iPod will read. I spent a good portion of last evening trying to find some way to make them recognize the files I loaded. Any suggestions?

I’ve come to realize that’s how blessings work a lot of the time. Blessings come, but not without us needing to do a little bit of the work. Very seldom does God just hand us a blessing, and not ask us to contribute something to make it reach its fullest potential. And sometimes, we have to do a bit of digging to really find all of the layers of hidden blessings. 

I don’t think it’s supposed to be too easy. I don’t think I’d like it if it was. Part of it is that God wants to grow us through the challenges that accompany blessing. But part of it is that God wants to partner with us, give us some ownership, rather than just dumping gifts in our lap. 

We have been given the blessing of partnering with God to take his love to a people that has never experienced that love. We’ve been blessed with a purpose. That purpose also requires us to do something. In order to be a part of their culture and share ours, we have to learn their culture. In order to find bridges between their beliefs and ours, we have to learn their beliefs. And in order to communicate with them, we have to learn their language.

Just as soon as we can load it on the iPods.