Christ's Grace Abounds: Text Editing Grace

Well, I have a flip phone which takes quite a while to write some messages. For those of you who may have forgotten, in order to text the words "said", you have to push the "7" key four times to get the "s", push the "2" key once to get the "a", push the"4" key three times to get the "i", and push the "3" key once to get the "d".

Anyway, it takes some time to write a more involved text. I asked someone to listen to it, so see if it made sense and would not be offensive to someone who was going to read it. (That's the tricky thing about having conversations with people by email or text, because they can read into these messages attitudes, sarcasm, etc. that are non-existent.) Anyway, that's why I asked this person's opinion.

After asking for their opinion, the whole thing went south! It's not that they thought anything could be misconstrued as offensive, but they wanted me to re-write the whole text that had taken me 20 minutes to create in the first place. I was feeling frustrated with their suggestions and the time it would take me to redo the whole text, when I prayed for Christ's Text Editing Grace. Of course, there is no special grace really called this. I have found that when I'm frustrated, I can say a really brief prayer to Christ, who already knows what's going on and pray something like, "Please give me Text Editing Grace, " and He does! It's amazing that Christ will respond to such a brief prayer, but He wants us to turn to Him in all aspects of our lives and there are times when it's not really conducive to saying an elaborate prayer.

After saying the brief prayer, I was led to listen more politely to the person's suggestions of how they thought I should reconstruct the whole text more for style than for the meaning of it. It saved an argument that had been about to leak out of my mouth any second, and it reduced my tension. I thanked the person for their suggestions and then re-read the text I wrote to see if it would be better off if I made any changes. If you would like to read more posts like this, you can find them at Christ's Grace Abounds on: https://christsgraceabounds.blogspot.com

Example of a Brief Prayer

But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved, even as they. Acts 15:11

I was with someone who was scooping up some free popcorn. They didn't ask me if I wanted any. The person told me that I should get a bag of popcorn and then took it from my hands. They wanted me to get the popcorn for them to eat later.

It's such a silly thing, but it really did irritate me. Didn't that person think about whether I wanted some or not? Couldn't they have asked me if I wanted some before they took it from my hands? I found myself getting frustrated at that person. Then, it popped into my mind that that's not what Christ wants of me. He wants me to be gracious to those who irritate me, but I was too frustrated to be gracious at that moment.

What I prayed was, "Popcorn Grace," and immediately Christ calmed me down, so that I didn't respond to the person in a less than positive manner. Although the "Popcorn Grace" prayer was very brief, I was asking Christ to please give me grace with this popcorn situation, so I would respond in a gracious manner, and He did! It amazed me that He knew and understood my brief prayer and granted me that grace, so I could be more gracious as an example of how He works in my life! I have continued to use these brief prayers which are changing my life and my response to others. If Christ can do this for me, He can most certainly do it for you, as well. Try it...what can it hurt?