Spirit of Grace? - The somewhat different Advent Calender X ...

Monday, Dec 10, 2012. In our government agency, which has 2600 people working therein, I have been observing some leader for a while now. He is quite active and has developed his area over years. But he has also some features, which frighten me. He is collecting little things to use them against people, to reach particular goals.

The spirit for a working environment …

What spirit do we want for our working environment. Often, we talk about the spirit of support and motivation, a team spirit to reach particular goals. Now, how do we reach such a spirit. It will be difficult to reach, as long as leading people try to prepare their attack against the employees by collecting things which might not have gone smoothly.

How perfect do we need to be? How does perfection in administrative things or little steps go together with the larger targets? In science, you want to make progress with larger questions. Of course, you also want to understand all the small steps, which lead to larger steps. But your main concern is not to fill out forms in time every day, but sincere progress for the systems you work with!

I tend to set priorities. The important things get high priority. The less important things get less priority. But then, it can happen that less important things are carried out late or not at all. But what, if you are suddenly judged by the less important things - just because it is much more difficult to judge the deeper questions? The whole approach is not good - we need to get the work spirit right, and for that we need something else to enter our life.

Turn into a mode of grace! …

We need to turn into a mode of grace! At Christmas, God comes with all his love and grace, he comes to us in Jesus. Christmas is the celebration of his grace. And the advent time is there for us to prepare our heart and our mind for his grace! Let us go to the Lord and ask him to help us on this path!!

The mode of grace can change our whole work environment. It can help to be less perfect, but to learn and improve, to work on the task we have and get over the things we fail to do right. It can really motivate and change humans!

Lord! You come in Jesus and give us so much, truth and love. Please come into my life, and change my heart, to know how to live this grace today, in my daily life. Please let me be a source of grace, where ever I go!

(Roland Potthast) ... more texts