Attitude

Yesterday I was working at a milk/ice cream/juice production plant out of town in a place called Leeston. I was with a whole bunch of people, and around 3pm we were all informed we would be finished work by "5pm at the latest". It had been a long day for those of us from Christchurch (I personally had a little over an hour's travel each way to get to the fatory, I had left home at 6:40am for an 8am start) and so we were looking forward to the end of the day. 10 minutes to 5 we start on the next job which ended up taking about an hour and a half. Needless to say, there was a lot of unhappy murmuring and outright complaining going on. I don't mind working a long day, but to be honest I was ready to go home and disappointed, and felt that we had been unfairly misled.

About 10 minutes into everyone's complaining and moaning, I became aware of my own attitude. Not that I was voicing any of this, but I found myself getting sucked into the negativity around me. I started thinking, "They (the bosses) need to sort themselves out, they need to get organized, how dare they keep us later than they said they would, some people have plans tonight, I hate this, I just want to leave, what would they do if we just stopped working" and so on and so on. I was annoyed, but the fact that things hadn't gone my way really didn't give me an excuse to treat my bosses with contempt and let my work ethic slip. How quickly my day changed from being pretty good to being pretty lame, and unfortunately (and sadly) it took far too long for me to sort myself out again.

I wish this story had a different ending, one where I changed my attitude from negative to positive, where I let this be reflected in how I carried out the rest of my day and that people noticed this and saw Christ in me. Unfortunately hindsight is all I have. I learnt a hard lesson.

The negative attitudes of others are extremely infectious.

In Romans 12:2 it says, "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

The pattern of this world is to grumble and complain, be insubordinate, be sinful, have a terrible attitude, treat others with contempt, be selfish, to steal, to bring others down, to abuse power, to kill, to deceive, the list goes on.

How often do we conform to this pattern world?

How infrequently do we let our mind be renewed and let this transform the way we live out our lives in every situation?

How often do we let the attitudes of those around us become our attitudes and ruin our day? And then bring that attitude home with us and let it impact negatively on our loved ones?

What would happen if we let the Holy Spirit renew our minds, if we listened to His promptings and lived our lives in a way that shows God to those around us? I reckon it would transform our society, our city, our country, our world.

Too many of us are guilty at one time or another of being no different to the world around us. We are called to be different. If there’s nothing different in our lives to those of our non-Christian friends, what do we have that they don’t?

We have Christ.
He should take first place in our life.
He should be seen in us.

I want my life to be a billboard for Him.
I want people to meet Him when they meet me.
I want people to want what I have.

I want Him to continue to transform me by the renewing of my mind, and for that to change the way I live.
That’s what I want.