Learn from my Bad Example

God changes lives with supernatural revelation, and he has been very generous with me lately. He gave me a compound revelation this month involving my attitude.

He showed me that I need to be much more reluctant to complain. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences in cultures where people were pressured to bury their heads in the sand, and I have come to love exposing the truth, but I haven’t done a good job of separating exposure from pointless bellyaching or from reviling or ridiculing. Revealing the truth is very important, and it’s very important to do it in situations where it will destroy your popularity, but you can’t let yourself obsess on what is wrong or let it become an excuse for giving up too early.

It’s good to say, “I hear a noise coming from my front end, so I need to have my bearings checked.” It’s bad to say, “I hate this car. It’s always letting me down. Why can’t I ever have a car that works right? Other people have good cars. I can’t believe this is happening again. I’m so sick of this thing.”

You have to appreciate what you have and what happens to you.

Here is what God has shown me: you have to have what I call an immigrant/orphan/warrior attitude.

Consider immigrants who move the USA. I know many of them are curses to us. Many come filled with hostility toward us. Some perform acts of terrorism. Some expect us to mold ourselves to their toxic, backward cultures, which they themselves fled, instead of adapting themselves to our superior culture. Many come here out of pure selfishness. All those things are true, but I’m not suggesting we be like them in those ways. I’m suggesting we be like them in our appreciation of what we have.

I read an anecdote about a visitor from Russia. This person kept telling her hosts how wonderful the USSR was and how inferior America was. She could not shut up. Then there was a trip to an American supermarket in the winter. The critic looked around at the packed shelves and the fresh fruit and vegetables and started to cry.

That individual appreciated a blessing I have enjoyed every single day I’ve spent in America. I, on the other hand, feel deprived when my local store doesn’t have the exact cut of choice beef I want to buy or the right brand and variety of tomatoes for pizza.

Consider orphans. Many are hard to place, so they get stuck in orphanages for years, or they go from one foster family to another. They dream of having their own homes, with siblings and parents. The rest of us don’t feel much gratitude for situations older orphans pray for every night.

My family did me a lot of harm, but at least I had a family. My bills were paid, and we never had to live in a shelter or even an apartment. My mother was wonderful. I knew my grandparents. I knew my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Both of my parents left me inheritances. My family damaged me more than most white American families, but it also did me a great deal of good.

Think about warriors. When a warrior in a superior force goes into battle, and enemy soldiers start shooting at his position, he doesn’t say, “I am cursed. These people should have given up as soon as they saw us, but they’re trying to kill us anyway, and now I have to go through a miserable battle.” A warrior expects conflict. It’s what he trains for. He sees it as a normal obstacle he has to pass in order to get to victory.

The other day I bought a new stove. My old primitive stove was very hard to clean, and it only had 4 burners. I was reluctant to cook because it was so difficult to get the stove back in order afterward. I found a great induction cooktop at Home Depot for something like 45% off. I measured the existing stove, and while I couldn’t get at the cutout in the stone counter to measure it, I made a reasonable assumption: because appliances are standardized, a 36″ induction cooktop would fit in a cutout made for a 36″ conventional cooktop.

I got the old cooktop out, and I found that the cutout was 3/8″ too short. I had expected the switch to take about 30 minutes. Now I was looking at hiring someone or buying unfamiliar tools, making the new cuts myself, and enduring a long, messy job. I also learned that the manufacturer had not included some brackets for supporting the new stove in a stone counter. I’m talking about two small pieces of steel plus a tube of glue. Should cost about 10 bucks. In fact, these things should be included in the package with a stove that retails for $1800. I looked online, and the price for the “kit” was about $135.

I felt defeated, and that’s ridiculous. I knew it was ridiculous. I apologized to God even while I was feeling defeated. I rejected the feeling.

I said I knew the stove was going to fit. Victory was already mine. No doubt about it. I wasn’t experiencing defeat. I was just having a setback. I was blessed with an $1800 stove for which I paid about $1000, I didn’t have to use cash to get it, I got free delivery, I didn’t need help removing the old stove, I was sufficiently handy to know I was going to be able to get the cutout enlarged, I was putting it in a beautiful kitchen in a magnificent house in an extremely pleasant county in the United States of America…what possible excuse was there for feeling cursed and defeated?

I didn’t have a warrior attitude. I had a snowflake attitude. An Antifa/BLM attitude. I knew it. I hated it. I refused to continue in it. I asked God to help me.

I knew that on the other side of the work and the mess, a fantastic new stove was waiting. The new stove has a top which is a continuous sheet of glass. Cleaning it after a messy cooking session takes less than 5 minutes. It has 5 burners, one of which is gigantic, which is a nice feature. It’s much, much faster than gas, conventional, or radiant cooking. It won’t work with certain cookware, but I can get new things, and I have additional portable burners anyway. When I’m not cooking, the surface functions as temporary counter space.

God was blessing me like crazy. Feeling defeated and wronged was not just incorrect; it was offensive.

I made a terrible mess when I installed the cooktop, but a tradesman would have made the exact same mess. Instead of getting a new stove for $1800 plus maybe $500 in installation costs, I got it for $1000, no cash left my bank account, and I learned a lot.

Along the way, I found out I didn’t need the expensive tube of glue and sheet metal brackets.

The Bible promises us victory over and over. It doesn’t say we’ll never have to fight or that things will go exactly the way we want. Victory is not the same thing as lack of conflict. When we win wars decisively, we still have to fight, and we still lose people. No one with any common sense says that makes us losers.

Sometimes God has shown me what it’s like to deal with me and my bad attitude. I have been in situations where I’ve been in charge of people who were doing various things. If you have employees, or if you have hired people temporarily, you’ve been there. I have dealt with people who whined and complained. I have dealt with people who stood around conversing instead of working, while I, the one who was paying them, worked. I’ve dealt with people who were so slow and lazy, they were literally much slower than I would have been had I done things alone. I’ve experienced resentment from people I was paying. I felt I was being punished for giving them money.

When I was slaving away as an armorbearer at Miami’s Trinity Church, I worked a couple of Richie Wilkerson’s Rendezvous meetings at the Fillmore Theater on Miami Beach. People volunteered to help the armorbearers. We were there mostly to manage crowds. I had a lot of experience, and I was in a position of authority. A young black man was part of my team.

I set things up the way they were supposed to be, in cooperation with the other armorbearers. Then this young man decided he was in charge. He started moving cordons and changing the way traffic flowed. He started telling me how things were going to be set up, as though I had volunteered to work for him!

His ideas were inept and would have caused problems. I immediately moved things back, and I told him I was running the team. I said if he wanted to help us, he had to follow orders.

He got so mad, he walked off and quit. He could not understand that he we were not equals on the team. It was impossible to explain this concept, which 98% of human beings chosen at random would have understood without being told. No one on the team could figure him out.

I never interacted with him after that. I forgot his face. I don’t know what happened to him. Another young man from the same area had also volunteered, and he could not have been more helpful. He kept making sure he was doing what the team wanted him to do. He never complained. After the conference was over, we would always wave at each other in church and converse a little.

I’ve dealt with a lot of people who could not submit, honor, or appreciate. I have often shown similar attitudes toward God.

If someone is willing to pay you and advise you when he has other options, and you make him miserable, he’s going to limit what he does for you. It’s just not worth it when you have to be treated like you’re imposing. On the other hand, when people have a good attitude, it makes you grateful. It makes you want to do more for them and to be more closely involved with them.

Surely we punish God when we aren’t grateful and respectful, and surely he responds by holding back our blessings. Surely he must increase our blessings when we have better attitudes. I believe there are things I wanted which God kept from me, and now I believe he will provide those things because I will reward him instead of making him wish he had a better son to work with.

Here is something Jesus said:

A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none.

Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?

And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it:

And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.

When you’re push-starting a car, you don’t push forever. If it doesn’t start to run eventually, you quit pushing.

Every day, I need to see my blessings as though they were new. When I get in my car, I should feel as though I were driving a new car off a dealer’s lot. When I sit in my air-conditioned house, I should feel as though I had been living in a tent in insufferable heat all my life. When I eat and drink, I should feel as though I had just been rescued from a month in a lifeboat. I live in a world where billions of people don’t have the good things I have. I could easily be replaced with someone more grateful.

That’s what happened to the Jews. I’m not talking about replacement theology. They are still God’s chosen. But if you read the Bible, you will see that they got in trouble over and over for taking God’s blessings for granted, and in the end, most didn’t appreciate the greatest blessing of all: their messiah. So most of what he offered went to Gentiles. Now, of course, most Christians take God and his blessings for granted, so we’re in the same boat.

I believe this revelation is extremely powerful and that it will bring me things I couldn’t get before. I pray, and I have faith, but faith isn’t everything. How effective can faith for a result be if God knows you’re going to make him wish he had never granted your request?

I’m astounded when I look back and think of all the blessings I’ve spat on and ruined. My education is an example. I barely did anything in high school, but one of the world’s best universities sent me a letter, asking me to apply. When I was accepted and my parents paid my tuition and expenses without hesitation, I didn’t appreciate it at all. I behaved like a character from the movie Animal House. I thought the administration was my enemy. I thought drunkenness was cool. I made trouble.

I wish I could go through high school again. I went to the best school in Florida. I could have focused on math and science. I could have gone to MIT or Caltech. Even Columbia, the school that accepted me, was a top-notch STEM school.

I know I couldn’t have done much better as things were. I didn’t know God, and I truly was cursed. My family was a constant source of discouragement and pain. Things didn’t go well even when I did things right. But if I had known God and had a better attitude, I would have excelled.

I know people who were thrilled to be able to go to community college. I know people who were thrilled to go to state universities. I know people who have student loans. I had a full ride at one of the best Ivy League schools, and I resented it!

I can’t complain about mowing the yard. Most people don’t have a yard. I can’t complain about doing bookkeeping and taxes. Most people have no money to manage. It’s amazing to me that I ever complained about cleaning up after my pets. Who chose to buy them? How many people are there who would love to have two beautiful exotic birds who love them?

I have to remember that regardless of what happens while I’m here on Earth, I have victory. Under the worst circumstances imaginable, which are nothing like my actual circumstances, I would still be saved when I died. The rejection and problems I face here are like the heckling and reviling Cubans used to experience when they chose to move to America. People would spit on them and call them worms. The speed bumps I deal with are temporary and unimportant, and they precede blessings that will make me forget them.

I think my new outlook will improve my life tremendously, so I want to tell other people who make the same mistakes I did. I hope someone else can make the change earlier and have a better life than the one I’ve had.