My job has historically been about people, not numbers. Last spring I was working with an Excel spreadsheet and in a moment of frustration I posted on my Facebook status a very revealing question: “Can anyone tell me how to add a column of numbers in Excel?” I rightly received plenty of mockery, along with a few kind souls who condescended to tell me how to do the simplest Excel function on the planet.
Yesterday, as a part of my new job, I was working with about a dozen of my staff team’s budgets. All on Excel. And all of them were counting me to know what the heck I’m doing as we make decisions about relatively important things like their pay checks, how much more fund raising they need to do, and whether or not they’ll have to leave campus to do it.
And so, in keeping with my last post, I was anxious. I didn’t want to screw things up. The situation called for resources that I wasn’t sure that I had—in this case, a working knowledge of Excel and a basic understanding of how to adjust and work the numbers.
In one of those instances that illustrates how random and sometimes poor the chapter breaks in the Bible can be, I was reading in 2 Corinthians 3 as Paul picks back up on the question that he posed back in chapter 2 that we considered the other day: “Who is equal to such a task?”
And after a brief tangent to start chapter 3, he comes back to continue to answer his own question: “ Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent…”
God has made Paul competent. I think that this plays out practically in two ways.
First, is the method that we all wish God would do more often: God zaps competence into us. In the mystery of his goodness and the power of his Spirit, we sometimes receive a gift that we didn’t know that we had or an insight or understanding that is clearly not of us and obviously given to us from God.
But the second method is much more common and therefore much less celebrated: God leads us into situations and circumstances in order to teach us things. Our competence comes from God as he leads us into a life of learning from people, classes, mentors, friends, Scripture, prayer, and trial-and-error.
We experience the ups and downs of this and therefore we think competence that comes in this way is of ourselves. But a moments inspection of this proves it to be utterly false. How many circumstances over which you had absolutely no control contributed to the process? How many people, opportunities, and resources came your way that were beyond your ability to manipulate or make happen?
So yesterday, I was led into a step of God-competence in Excel. In a moment of mild panic, I called my old boss. She’s been doing this for over a decade. She’s walked me through a couple of simple processes that helped me to understand how to make changes in someone’s budget so we could run different scenarios. No Enron book-cooking here, I promise.
I much prefer to avoid situations where I am generally incompetent. And when I am forced into a situation where I’m clearly incompetent, I much prefer for God to zap me with competence.
But yesterday was a good example of walking in God’s plan to develop competence in me. It’s his doing. I’m his follower, his disciple. He’s teaching me all the things that I need to know—including who to turn to for help when help is needed.
I will probably never be exceptional at Excel. That doesn’t really bother me all that much. But I do want to learn to recognize and embrace how God is at work to shape me and grow me and teach me…whether that occur via a zapping or more conventional means.
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