Step 7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

Gordie Jackson
3 min readJan 17, 2018

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Mont Saint-Michel, Normandy France, Summer 2011 / gjphotos

I think my personality is coming to bear with these steps. I seem to be rushing ahead of myself which is often as I am in life. The steps are telling me to take it slower. I thought I had asked him to remove my shortcoming yesterday! I look back at Step 6

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

O, I see, yesterday was only about being ready it wasn’t about having the surgery done. I can see I made a huge assumption, I didn’t ask and I didn’t ask humbly. Did I just expect? I think I must have. I hear a voice say, “This is a relationship, not an assumption.”

I am beginning to see that I just expect God to do. A relationship means I should ask and that it should be a joint process. I assumed God would want to remove my shortcomings what if he didn’t? What if he thought some of my shortcomings would keep me humble and stop me from thinking I have life sorted?

Come to think of it he may not remove them all in one go which is what I was hoping. It begins to sound like it is a process not bound by time.

Tonight one of my shortcomings came to light when I was speaking to the customer adviser at Virgin Media. I had tolerated an intermittent internet service for what seems like 6 weeks. When I did phone if was after 10 and they were closed though the automated voice told me that there were problems in my area. It offered to take my mobile number and send me text updates. It didn’t.

Tonight it happened before 10 and I pressed 5 for ‘Thinking about leaving Virgin’. It does tell you something when you have a number for this alone!

Roberta the customer service answered less than the 10 minutes queue that I was told I was in. She was going through the script and I interrupted.

Shortcoming number 1-I hate people pretending they are giving me a personalised service when they are going through the motions.

She didn’t get what I was saying. Her computer did not log all the problems and the times I had phoned

Shortcoming number 2- I hate people assuming their system know better than me, the customer

She tried to explain that my comments would be fed back to the teams but I would n’t get an explanation.

Shortcoming number 3-what sense does that make? I call on my time and you can’t give me an explanation.

You can imagine it didn’t go well with Roberta. I was as this was going on that I remembered what I wrote about last night something about these things being a magnet to draw out what is in us.

Wayne Dyer often asked the question, “What comes out when we are squeezed?” If there is goodness inside goodness will come out if not so good is inside not so good will come out.

Curiously Roberta and I did manage to resolve some of the issues though for me pleasant feelings were not circulating. That old anxiety was showing itself. I can see God has his work cut out with me!

g

PS that photo cheers my soul. For years I sat not learning French though a poster of Mount St Michel always caught my eye. I wandered inside it with my imagination. 25 years later I wandered inside with my body.

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Gordie Jackson

Speaks with a Northern Irish accent, lives in Hertfordshire, England.