As Citizen King sings, “Cuz I've seen better days”, or at least that is how I felt yesterday as I left work. Overall, it really wasn’t a bad day but there was an incident that certainly tainted the day.
BACKGROUND
I utilize MSN Messenger at work to facilitate communication among our employees. We had a new employee that I set-up with email and MSN Messenger. She began to have problems logging onto MSN Messenger and I discovered there was a problem with the account. I contacted Microsoft to have this resolved and in the interim, I set-up a fake e-mail account and created a new MSN Messenger account. The fake e-mail account was coming to me because it was temporary and was never meant to be used.
I received an e-mail from someone that I didn’t recognize, but I get a great deal of mail from various accounts and for various reasons so this is not out of the ordinary. I opened the message and began to skim it to see what it was about. I soon realized it was a personal message for this employee that had been sent to that fake account. This was a very personal message, which I wish I hadn’t seen. I debated as to whether I should just delete it and forget about or if I should forward it along to them.
The later seemed more like the appropriate thing to do, but I felt I needed to clarify what happened. Knowing the content of the message I also sent along a word of encouragement to talk to someone at work if they were unhappy about their job situation and wanted to get those issues resolved. We had not spoken about this at all and I noticed there was some level of tension mounting between us.
UN-BETTER DAY
So yesterday I asked if everything was alright because I had noticed I was being ignored. This may or may not have been a wise decision of mine. They proceeded to lay into me accusing me of monitoring their e-mail, informed me that the message was not sent to the address I explained that it was and that we weren’t friends so my advice was not needed. They also told me that my supervisor was supposed to talk to me about this.
Very shocked at this reaction I explained what had happened again and asked that my message be re-read. That it was an accident that I read the message, but I can’t change the past. Additionally, I reminded them that my message did not deal with any of their personal issues and was merely suggesting that to resolve any work related hard-ships they would need to speak to someone at work that could help. None of this seemed to matter and accusations continued.
The muscle in my upper leg was now twitching as I strained to contain my anger. I informed them that if they had come to me directly about this in the first place, that it would have been resolved quicker, but now the situation had elevated and they were refusing to understand. I apologized for having read the message, but added that it was their decision whether to accept that and move on or not. They obviously did not care and choose to hold onto the tension. So I walked away.
I took a walk around the block to cool off and collected my thoughts. When I came back into the building I had a message that Amy called, so I called her and gave a very brief synopsis of what happened. She suggested that I pray about it and when I got off the phone that is exactly what I did.
Last night we spoke about it in more depth, and I discovered that while my intentions were good I probably should not have offered up any advice showing that I'd seen any part of the message. I struggle with this because I really truly wanted to reach out and help. We decided the best way to help now was to simply pray for them, which we did.
BETTER DAY
I awoke this morning with a renewed and refreshed view of the situation. Reaching the conclusion that I could not change their point of view and that wasn’t even needed. I have no personal problems with them and really truly hope they are able to find peace and happiness. I will continue to lift them up in prayer in hopes that they may find the comfort they need. My true hope is that they will find a way to put their trust and faith in Jesus Christ. To that end, it is entirely in the hands of the Holy Spirit and I pray that I will be used in such a way to exhibit grace, humility and understanding.
Nothing short of that is expected from a citizen of the glorious kingdom of God.
Posted by price at August 11, 2004 01:34 PM