Celebrate God’s goodness

Today in general is a good day. By God’s grace, I was quite calm to handle different tasks one by one. But as the day goes and I got things done several items, my expectations arise higher and higher to the point that I become stressed again. I was stressed as I started to see that I could perform and expect more from myself. It is so easy to forget on how difficult it was for me to get 1 thing done in a day. But now as I can see several simple things get done, I want to have more and more.

In Max Lucado’s book of Anxiety for Nothing, there is an acronym of CALM. C is for Celebrate God’s goodness. I think I need that. Time is always limited, no doubt. We cannot finish everything that we want. So the choice is ours whether we want to be thankful or want to be grudging. For example, three things I am thankful today is the courage to contact people about the meeting agenda this Thursday, the chance to have lunch with several colleagues in a more relax way instead of forcing myself to keep talking, and handling things one by one.

At the same time, I got a reminder that when people remind me or give feedback, it is out of their care and not for me to take personally. I guess my tendency to react negatively is there due to my pride. As I become better, I kind of expect people to appreciate it and give me more space. So when I receive feedbacks to improve on, I become defensive as I wanted to do them perfectly and because I feel I have done a lot. May God give me the humility to see that actually even when my feeling improves, often the quality or the speed of work do not. So there is no need to demand for acknowledgement. More importantly, even if it is not just feeling, it is not right to demand other people’s acknowledgement or understanding. Remember, we do things not to please people but to please God.