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Working for 4 days later, I feel a little bit relief on Friday because I know weekend is coming. Two of my colleagues happened to stop by my office. One of them said, “Hey, it is Friday…Relax…. It is getting better every minute.”  “Well, not so quick, it is closer to Monday every minute, actually.” The other colleague responded immediately.

This simple conversation gives me some insights of a person’s view. In fact, we can use a simple illustration like this: when there is a half-filled cup, do you consider it as “half full” or as “half empty”? How you consider the cup would reveal your personality in some sort. You will find that it is very common to meet persons with these two types of personality from wherever you go. As we know, a person with half-empty view tends to worry more but more careful than the half-full one. Under all circumstances, this may not be bad actually, since you need to have both kinds of person in order to have a balance view.

Recent resource actions at workplace affected some of the families in the area. How you view this kind of activity, however, also reveals your personality – from a “half-full” or from a “half-empty” view. I think, with our flesh eye, we would have “half-empty” view more than “half-full” view since we tend to see limitation and difficulties ahead of us. In fact, as one of my job assignments at work is doing risk and exposure assessment, my personality tends toward half-empty one too 🙂

In the Gospels, we could see a few examples from the disciples of Jesus. One of them is the response from Philip to Jesus in the miracle of “Jesus feeds the five thousand”. He said, “It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite! 腓 力 回 答 說 ： 就 是 二 十 兩 銀 子 的 餅 ， 叫 他 們 各 人 吃 一 點 也 是 不 夠 的(John 6:7b)”. The other one is in the miracle of “Jesus calms the storm”. You could see the panic mode from the disciples on the boat. The disciples woke Jesus and said to Him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?(Mark 4:38b)”  Then our Lord’s response to them was:

“Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith? 耶 穌 對 他 們 說 ： 為 甚 麼 膽 怯 ？ 你 們 還 沒 有 信 心 麼 ？(Mark 4:40)”

My dear brothers and sisters, do we have faith in our Lord that we could see things with our spiritual eye instead of our flesh eye? The spiritual view would let us see “He is omnipotent” and any difficulties may be just opportunities for us to learn and to be trained. I understand that  this is not easy initially. However, if we take heart and have faith in Him, then we will see things differently, I believe.