Job 9:27 – I will forget my complaint; I will change my expression and smile.
If anyone had reason to complain, Job did! He had lost his family, his home, his animals, everything in his life that mattered to him except his faith. Somehow he kept a good attitude and found a way to smile.
There are many days that things don’t go exactly as I had planned. I’m a list maker and a planner. I like planning my day and feeling like at the end of it, I have accomplished a lot. Every day I have a need to be productive. I want to be able to see the fruits of my labor. If I can’t see results, sometimes I complain and search for the culprit that interrupted my perfectly planned day of productivity.
But sometimes God has other things planned for me that are not on my to-do list. Sometimes the fruits of my labor may not seem like much to me in the “productive” mode that I like to be in. But if God decided to change my plans because His plans were better than mine, then I got accomplished exactly what He wanted me to accomplish – even if it wasn’t on MY to-do list.
When things don’t go as you have planned, forget the complaint, like Job did. It’s not our circumstances that determine whether we have a good day or a bad day; it’s our attitude about those circumstances. We are not in control of the circumstances but we are in control of our attitude and how we handle those circumstances.
So I will remember today as I go about my day, with my to-do list in hand and my productivity mode in overdrive that I need to keep a good attitude even when things don’t go as planned. At the end of the day, I hope I have a to-do list with everything marked off and a sense of accomplishment about me whether it was on my to-do list or the to-do list created by “the little culprit of change”. And if the “culprit of change” happens to be God, then I will not complain because I’m pretty sure He is smiling holding His own scratched off to-do list!
