It is now 3pm on a Monday afternoon. Almost all or my tasks have been completed, except of course whatever amendments there may be to a few draft documents I have put on my principal’s table. He is out for a meeting and should be back shortly, I think. Until then, I am relatively free and this would not translate well onto my time sheet. This is my perennial problem. Yet, here I am sweating the issue week after week.
Show me the straw! (otherwise how to make bricks la)
Last night a friend called. She and her husband have just bought a house and had called me a few days before about doing the property transaction for them. I had then given them an estimate of our usual charge. Last night she said she found someone else who could do it much more cheaply. I was going to counter offer her and ask what rate could make us more competitive, when I recalled the conversation I had with Tim, a colleague, when we were driving back from the retreat on Saturday arvo.
The boss had launched into a tirade against Tim, implying he had done a deal behind the boss’s back, by agreeing to a lower retainer. He had hinted that I was doing the same, when my pastor wanted a will done and I asked the boss if the fee could be lower.
No, I wasn’t going through the trouble of getting work in by counter-offering a lower fee, when that sort of attitude was floating through the organisation. He didn’t trust me, didn’t trust Tim and is unlikely to start trusting us anytime soon. He recognises our reticence to charge high fees but somewhere in that very fertile mind of his, he harbours suspicions that our reticence isn’t entirely due to modesty or profit-shyness.
I wasn’t going to feed that suspicion by offering a deal on a Sunday night to an old friend. I therefore very promptly commended her for finding a cheaper solicitor and said yes, she should go ahead and appoint that solicitor. Sure, it would have meant no favours to my record of time sheet and billings but so what else is new…I sure can do without additional angst.
I don’t know – maybe after all these months sweating the issue, I’ve had it and would not let it get to me anymore. Obviously I still think about it an awful lot but just as clearly, I have stopped letting it upset me too much. I think about it, shrug the shoulders a bit and get on with other stuff. Maybe it is effluxion of time and with it comes numbness or familiarity which flushes out uneasiness. Maybe the peace of God which surpasses all understanding really is flowing through.
Unlike Malaysia, I cannot just walk away from a job and expect some alternatives to spring up (in fact even in Malaysia, that would no longer be true, if what I’ve been told/reading is accurate). But all the more so here, that is a tricky proposition. Walk away and the uncertainty, the very real prospects of having no alternatives save that which we create for our own, looms.
It is this knowledge which makes me think that it is the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, which is at work. The logical side of me would have made such thoughts/prospects unthinkable and therefore setting me off on a nerve-wrecking bout. Yet, I am learning to just quietly depend on God, whatever the outcome may be.
Ante 