Guess I haven’t learned yet.

Last night at work I got soundly reprimanded by the restaurant owner. It seems I was getting a little heated because there were dishes that needed to be loaded and a dish rack was in the way of unloading the previous load. The co-worker I was dealing with did not speak very good English, and I was getting frustated trying to communicate with him. (He’s from Ecuador.) Anyhow, Filippo—that’s the owner—got angry at me, and rightly so, because I wasn’t behaving in the right way. I apologized, and the night was pretty tense after that, but I’m not fired.

I guess sometimes you learn and get to use that knowledge too!

An Encouraging Note

♬Be not dismayed, whate’er betide, God will take care of you.♬

Have a wonderful day.

Respect and Trust

As I’ve said before, respect is required if a marriage is to succeed. That said, though, it is not up to the individual to require respect from another. Trust is very important, too, but if trust is broken, it must be earned again unless the person doing the trusting voluntarily decides to trust again. This is a very important distinction to make, and I regret not having learned this lesson sooner—on the supply side, trust is given, and respect is given; but on the receiving end they should not be expected, but worked for instead.

And to the one I’ve offended: if you give me a chance, I promise to earn your trust and respect; and I’ll work very hard to do so. I know I haven’t been trustworthy and respectable in the past, but I want to make it up to you.

Don’t listen to me...

Don’t listen to me when I talk about how to save a marriage. Why do I say that? Because I’m divorced, and so I haven’t gotten a chance to try what I’m advocating and see it work for me. Now you wouldn’t put a water pump on your car off of a car that you knew had overheated, would you? So why take marriage advice from a divorcee? Obviously I’m not qualified to share ideas about how husbands and wives should behave toward each other—my marriage was a complete failure. All I can tell you is what hasn’t worked.

But there is someone who can tell you: God. He invented marriage, and He knows how it should work. Study the Bible, and take what you read personally. If we think the Word of God only applies to others, it cannot change us. And I include myself in that.

A thought

There’s a lot of controversy today about whether the Bible should be taken seriously... Just consider this: Ephesians 5:25b-27a reads, “...even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing...” When you get into the shower, do you let the water only wash part of you? Do you stand there watching the water fall and wonder what it all means? Do you pick and choose which drops are hitting your body? Of course not! We all just let the water freely flow over us, washing away all the dirt on our skin. But isn’t this exactly what some of us do with the Bible? Think about it.