The Project from Hell

Unexpected phone call from the CFO.  Nice guy.  Tasked with the Project from Hell.  An Audit of one of our divisions in another state.  All of the auditors are brand spanking new, they know nothing about our industry or what we do.  Assigns a portion of it to me with a 48 hour deadline.

Office door closed.  Hunkered down, staring at my screens for 2 solid days, going cross-eyed from the Excel spreadsheets with only the color-coding of highlighted rows and columns to keep me from going completely crazy.  Searching for files in our system, opening related pdf docs, then running OCR text recognition to be able to mark up some of them.   Save As to a network folder so another can review the items and call with questions.  Endless email strings to get answers to questions that matter only to auditors.

Coworkers with a great sense of humor.  Large sign appears on my door:  DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT KNOCKING ON MY DOOR – ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE JUST HERE TO WHINE ABOUT SOMETHING.   Allison understands.   Laughter for others.   Nice.

Compassion for the CFO.  Irritation with the unknown auditors who are just doing their jobs.  Frustration with internal staff whose errors cause hours of managerial time to explain or ask forgiveness for.  Desire to feel traction with the project.  Desire to be done with the project.

Day 4.  One last round of questions looking for new, different answers that don’t exist.   Big, heavy, audible sigh.   Talk to the boss for ideas and encouragement.  Take a break to have a meeting.  Unexpected wonderful outcome to the meeting.  Return to office to tackle audit tasks to find the requests have been rescinded.  I have unintentionally invoked and benefited from Dr. Kinneavy’s rule:  if you wait long enough the deadline will pass.

It was going to be okay all along, I just couldn't see it.  Big smile.  Happy face.  Life is good again.  Thank you God.  

Freedom

Recently I heard two foreign pastors speak at our church.  One was from Romania, the pastor of a large evangelical Christian church.  He spoke of the amazing ways in which God answered prayer to start their church, grow it in spite of an oppressive communist government, to topple that government and even to establish an accredited university.  You couldn’t miss the supernatural work of our Creator in that story.

The other was a young pastor of a small evangelical Christian church in Jerusalem.  He is a Palestinian Christian.  He spoke of persecution, and great faith in the face of it.  He talked of masked men of that country’s predominant religion that came to his door to kill his father, more than once, and how God protected them.  He has been beaten and threatened many times simply because of his Christian beliefs.  His church has to keep moving from one rented building to another because the ‘religious’ men vandalize the buildings where any Christians dare to gather in public.  At his church they used to keep water pots by the altar to put out the fires started by bombs tossed by those men.  He told of two young girls who were converted from the Muslim religion to Christ-followers, and how they went from unhappy lives to daily joy in the Lord.  They were so happy they shared their faith in Christ every day with the young children in their neighborhood.  They were killed in their beds because of it.

I have taken for granted the incredible freedom we have in this country to worship wherever and whenever we choose.  No one has tried to kill me for what I believe; the worse I have experienced is ridicule and that not often.  I go to church not even thinking of a firebomb attack.  It burdens my heart when I see any American freedoms jeopardized, whether by our own ignorant government or power-hungry people within it, or the truly wicked at heart who would see freedom squelched for their own reasons.   Blood was spilt over 200 years ago in this country so I could have this freedom, and blood is spilt every hour of every day in other countries by those trying to keep others from exercising it.

May we cherish our freedom, live it out, and fight to the death those who would try to steal it.