I don't like to be taken advantage of... conned, snookered, deceived... whatever you want to call it. It makes me mad, and it hardens my heart... as in, you may have fooled me this time-but it won't happen again.
The problem with a heart that gets hard is that you can start distrusting everyone. And that causes us to miss God opportunities.
This morning, Andrew Loveland and I traveled to the home of our "We Are The Sermon" (WATS) Day client. Andrew and I are team leaders, and we needed to survey our site in order to estimate what supplies we'd need.
I'd heard some less-than-positive things about a few of the occupants of our WATS house. I felt my heart starting to harden up. Were we being scammed into doing some work on the home of "unworthy" people?
The middle-aged lady who came to the door began to thank us even before she had the storm door opened. What I took to be two of her grandchildren smiled shyly from behind her. With tears in her eyes, this lady told us of her struggle to maintain her house since her husband had been incapacitated by a stroke. Most of her day was spent alongside her husband, caring for him.
Thanks, God, for once again rubbing some of your sweet-smelling oil on my heart so that it doesn't get hard. Yeah, there are most likely some unsavory family members living under this lady's roof. But handing out a cup of cold water in the name of Jesus is not something I ever want to stop doing because someone might not deserve the water. I'll leave working that out up to the One whose grace, mercy and wisdom far exceeds mine.
