Frustration = Living in the Flesh

I was working out this morning and was watching Joyce Meyer on TV and she said something very interesting. Basically, she said if you're frustrated you're living in your flesh and not God's grace. It got me thinking.

There are many days that I get frustrated, even at the littlest stupidest things. When I look back at the time I was frustrated I can see that I definitely was trying to do something my way, the way I thought it should be done, etc. Contrast that with the times that I consciously ask God to help me in the situation and how easy the process goes. I still might have hurdles to jump, but my attitude is much better during the process.

I can honestly say that there have been times at work where I want to scream so loud and smash my computer because there is some programming error I can't figure out, or some server issue I can't figure out. WITHOUT FAIL, when I actually pause and just take a little time to ask God to show me the answer, I get the answer right away (or least without too much more difficulty). I'm serious, without fail. It is actually incredible that I don't stop and ask for God's help more often in life. He is just waiting for us to ask. His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

True Story:
About 2 years ago I was dealing with a very random server issue in that the entire hard drive of the server reverted back to a point in time about 6 months in the past from the current date. Any change, file, etc that was made or put on the server between that time was completely gone. Disappeared into thin air. I was frantically working all night with our data center and we ended up getting things put back together, files restored from backups, settings re-applied, etc. They were trying to figure out what was going on with the server.

About a month later, it happened again! I could have screamed so loud that people in China would have heard me. However, I put my head down and got things restored, settings re-applied, etc. It was a major pain and took almost a full 24 hours to deal with. I told the data center we had to figure out what was going on. Well, they said they had never heard of this happening before. I tried Google searches, etc, and honestly I couldn't find anyone else in the world that ever had this issue. These sorts of things just don't happen on Windows servers.

Well a few months later it was about 11pm on a Friday night and the server reverted itself again to a point in time in the past. My heart was racing, my blood pressure was about to explode, and really felt like I was going to just start bawling. You have no idea how stressful that was to try and re-update everything on the server, including files clients added themselves via FTP.

I remember just falling to my knees and I said "God, I'm so tired, I'm weary. I need your help, I need you to fix this server. Please help me figure this out." I got the idea to just reboot the server (which I had done on all previous times), but this time, when the server came back online, it was back to normal! Everything that had been reverted back to a point in time in the past was fixed and it was as if nothing had happened! You know I praised God so much that night and I now call Him my "Server Admin".

The problem hasn't happened since and the data center guys after telling me over and over there was nothing they could do eventually tracked it down to a bad RAID controller.

I truly believe God's grace intervened that night.