For three and a half years I worked at a large coffee chain. There are always entertaining things happening around you when you work in customer service. The level of entertainment grows exponentially when most of the people you are working with have gotten out of bed between the hours of 3:30-6am. I have no idea how they expected me to be awake enough to serve coffee to the crazy people that chose to be up at 4am. Most of the business at our store was from our drive through window. I have said some absolutely ridiculous things to people while working in that drive through. One time instead of greeting the car at the speaker box with the name of our store, I said, "Welcome to Wandermere donuts." This is a mystical donut shop that does not exist and this greeting led to hysterical laughter from myself, the customer in the car and everyone I was working with. Of course I said it again a week later because I was trying so hard not to say it.
Our customers really liked their dogs and loved when we gave them dog treats (although this is completely against health code, just a little FYI). There were some of my co-workers who loved giving dog treats to customers in our drive through. Shockingly enough, I was not one of those people, but I can appreciate a well behaved dog who isn't trying to attack me as I hand the treat over. I'm really glad that you love your dog, but I do not, especially when it's about to jump out of your car. But I digress, back to the story. One morning I was working with a particular co-worker in the drive through who is just altogether friendly and fun to work with. In fact, she trained me, so I'm a bit partial to her. She is also a better person than I. She was doing her due diligence and cheerfully giving every car with a dog their treasured treat. As I finished making a coffee beverage and I turned to hand it off to her, she looked back at me with a sheepish grin which immediately turned into fits of laughter. She explained to me that she had just offered a dog biscuit to the baby sitting in the back seat.
We often make judgments with our peripheral view. We notice the skateboarder out of the corner of our eye that is about to run us over and we get out of the way. We duck when we see a bird flying right at us from a a glance we caught while shifting our eyes. We make a decision without all of the facts. Our peripheral view is important to keep us safe, but it also can be misleading. Sometimes that bird was really far away or the skateboarder turned the corner and we look like an idiot jumping out of the way for nothing. Our descion turns out to be pretty ill-informed. Or we give a dog biscuit to a baby.
When we take the time to look harder at the peripheral view, we get better clarity and avoid some embarrassing situations. But it's impossible to focus on everything that comes our way, right? When we bring these things to the Lord, he can give us the things we need to focus on. He can help us heal from hurts, let us know we need to let go of the pain someone caused us, he can send us in a specific direction. He might take something out of focus and put something lying in the outskirts to the front and center of our attention.
Earlier this week I took a whole day to do a personal prayer retreat. To take all the stuff running a thousand miles a minute around my brain and dump it all. I put it in front of the Lord and asked him to help me sort through it, what's important and what's not as important?
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