No I’m not talking about yoga or stretching. Although I could stand to do a bit more of that in my life. I hear it’s really beneficial for your body, but I’m getting sidetracked now.
At our training another couple and us would joke about how our middle names needed to be changed to “Flexible”. Sometimes working for a huge corporation creates lots of miscommunication or just plain no communication. So we’d joke about how in order to be successful in this job, one thing that we needed to be was flexible. It was our way of dealing with frustrations and irritants that came along the way even as late as our training two months before we left.
For people that plan and organize everything from their spices to their calendar, being flexible is not the easiest thing in the world. It creates LOTS of frustration, anger and sometimes, hurt feelings. But if God has taught me anything this year (which believe me, He has!) it’s that I really can’t do my job unless I’m flexible.
What does this look like here? Well the people here aren’t organized for one thing. Like at all! Seriously they don’t even know what a calendar is. No they do, but you get my point! You can’t really plan a specific time to meet with someone. You just have to give a 3-4 sometimes 5-hour window for your meeting. And that’s just for them to show up. Also people just drop by unannounced. Now for some people in the South (who shall remain nameless…my husband), this is perfectly acceptable. But in IL, you just don’t do that! So sometimes your plans or goals for the day get thrown out the window when someone drops by for 3 hours unexpectedly.
And of course the company flexibility continues. They are constantly re-organizing, re-structuring, making things more efficient (or so they think J). Seriously, in the year we’ve been on the field, we’ve had 3 “new and improved” medical expense reports to fill out and 5 different emails to send them to! BUT we love our company and as frustrating as it can be to a person that doesn’t want to be flexible sometimes, we’d never change it. They take SUCH good care of us and we are incredibly blessed.
So all this to say that one thing that God continues to impress upon this not so flexible person is the importance of being able to chuck your plans and go with His. You never know what the person who stops by unannounced might need to hear from Him. You never know what the re-organization might bring to bless your life more. Jesus is a great example. When people stopped listening to Him, He just got up and left. No second thoughts like “Well my planner says that I need to leave on this day”, no getting angry that people were changing what He was doing. He was simply flexible with Himself and gave of Himself without another thought.
The thing is that if you remain inflexible to the changes around you, you WILL go crazy. Trust me, I know this from experience. So when your neighbor comes over for an unexpected visit, or it takes 3 hours to pay a bill of $2 or your language test gets postponed again and again, the only way to survive is to follow His example and just be flexible.
