So I Must Be Part Artist

They say that artists are a temperamental lot.  They’re easily upset, and they may blow up at any time.  I don’t think that, up to this point, I would have considered myself an artist¹, but in the recent days my reaction to stress has been less than appropriate.

I have been in a lot of stressful jobs during my short life².

History of Stress

In college I worked in the kitchen, bringing food to the lines, and I prided myself with running one of the fastest teams there.  I would call that self-induced stress.

In my day job, in the beginning, I would be the one to go to sites and run field trials, as well as troubleshoot problems.  It’s hear where I hit a wall when it came to stress.

We had a case where our software was fine, but there was a hardware bug that created all sorts of problems– just that we didn’t know it was hardware, and could not explain why our software would be doing such things.

After many panicked phone calls, I had my limit of stress, and almost welcomed the move out of that department and that responsibility.

But that hasn’t ended the stress, it just changed its variety.

Handling Stress

Stress, however, is self inflicted.  It’s something that we allow ourselves to get caught up in when we lose perspective.  It’s something that shows us our heart believes that it’s all about me, and not Him.

You see, stress is something that we place on ourselves when we believe that we’re the important person, when we’re indispensable– basically when we think very highly of ourselves and our skills.

And it gets worse when we fail– and we do fail.

The key, as I was reminded yesterday, was perspective.  When we remember that our “day job” is secondary to our life in Christ, we are not as stressed about the job.  When we realize that how we react is more important to the cause of Christ than being “right”, then we will have the right attitude– even when we know our boss is wrong.

That’s one of the reasons why Christ asked us to take his yoke upon us– for His yoke is easy and His burden is light.  If we’re concerned with Him and not about us, we’ll find that this is true indeed.

1. Or a writer for that matter! [↩]
2. My son informed me last night that you’re not old until you’re in a wheel chair.  I figure on being young for a long time. [↩]