Romans 8:29

If you remember my new years goals, you may remember this one...

5. To speak words of encouragement and not mean words, impure words, or gossip.

Yeah, well, clearly God agreed with me that I needed a bit of work on this.

At the beginning of the year, I was getting slightly frustrated because I didn't feel like I was growing as much spiritually. My old team leader quit, and the result was that I didn't have to daily be stretched in patience. My new team leader is great, and I get along fairly well with everyone else in the team.

I don't really believe that God gives us real "down-time" of non-character growth - at least not if we're in step with His plan for us. He is always conforming us to the image of His Son, Jesus Christ. So I knew I was missing something. I prayed about this for a while, and God brought this to my attention:

The thing is, my work collegues are not all the most effective workers. (Actually, none of them are that effective - even those that think they are. I even probably aren't, and I'm generally recognised as the fastest at everything, only person who can cope outside on their own, etc, etc.) And as a result, while I was getting along well with everyone individually, the rest of the team is more or less at war. And so they are all going back and forth with the comments about how useless so-and-so is and how they are so slow at nappies and how they don't set up well, etc, etc.

And they pretty much all come to me to complain about everyone else.

And it's really hard to not complain with them.

But I'm getting better at keeping my mouth shut.

So with this and the occasional annoying church member, I'm getting a lot of practice.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, whohave been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. Romans 8:28-29