A friend of mine once told me that they were planning to take a family member out to dinner for their birthday, but they were not looking forward to the event. I assumed that this meant that there was an ongoing conflict between the two and asked what the source of the conflict was. My friend told me that there was no conflict but that when their family member interacted with servers at a restaurant, they often were overly demanding, hyper-critical, and rude. He said that it seemed that his family member was never satisfied and consistently critical to a point that he was embarrassed to share a meal with him.

I fear the consumer-focused world we live in encourages a complaintive spirit. Business owners rightly are concerned that a bad review, fair or unfair, could hurt their business. Consumers today are well versed in all the ways that opinions and reviews can be posted online about businesses. This, along with the often-repeated mantra that “the customer is always right,” creates an atmosphere where entitlement and selfishness can run amuck.

Things are sad at my house this week. Our 11-year-old golden retriever died this past Monday. Copper came to our family as a gift from friends and proved to be a gift of God’s grace. When he joined our family, our oldest was eight years old, and our youngest was two years old. With such a young family, Dana had a lot on her plate. She was home with the children, and a new dog would only add to her responsibilities. Because of this, I felt that the decision of when (or if) we would get a new dog should be hers. It had been a while since our first dog had died, and other than saying she wanted our next dog to be a small breed we had talked very little about getting anything new.

Then one day, Dana called me at church to tell me that the Hancock’s had offered to give us a dog. Mike and Cathy Hancock were members of our church and good friends. I had been to their home many times and knew that the dogs that they bred were beautiful golden retrievers and that the father was large for the breed. A little surprised that Dana was considering having another large breed dog, I asked if she was sure she wanted a golden retriever. She countered that she thought a new dog would be good for the children. I was happily surprised both by the gift of the Hancocks and the receptiveness of Dana.

I have an odd collection of rocks on the bookshelf in my office. Among the collection are a jagged chunk of concrete, two broken bricks, three red cylinders cut from a brick wall, and a large cement cylinder cut out of a floor.

The first of the collection is the large cement cylinder. It stands about 4 inches tall. The sides are smooth from the blade that cut it. The smooth sides reveal the rock and rebar that were once part of the first floor of Roberts Hall, a men’s dormitory on the Rome, GA campus of Shorter University. During my sophomore year of college, the building was being wired for a new campus phone system and computer network. To provide access to each floor for the needed wiring, holes were drilled through the concrete floors. The new phone system was rendering the payphones on each floor obsolete, so their closets made convenient spaces through which to run the new wiring. The payphone closet was adjacent to the place at the end of the hallway, where I would often go late at night to read scripture and pray. The circular coring blade that cut through the concrete produced smooth-sided cement cylinders that the workmen left on the floor when they finished. One night, as I was reading scripture and praying, I noticed the forsaken remnants of the previous day’s work and decided to take one piece to be a reminder of how the Lord had been so gracious in those days and at that spot to draw me to Himself. It became a treasured reminder to me of God’s grace to convict me of sin and to deepen my obedience to His word.

I have a cheap little screwdriver in my desk drawer. Calling it cheap is likely too gracious of a word. It has the form of a miniature screwdriver but not the ability to perform the task of such a tool. This little screwdriver is not an effective tool for anything. It is cheaply made, and if it were to be used for anything that caused real pressure to be applied, it would likely break or bend under the strain. So why do I keep it in my desk drawer? I keep it because of who gave it to me.

When I was a child, my mother would often take us to visit my great-aunt, who lived in a nursing home in Columbus, GA. When we would enter the building, we would be greeted by a resident who spent his days sitting by the front door. He seemed to always be there. The front of the building had large floor-to-ceiling windows. He likely enjoyed the spot by the front door because it afforded him a good view of the world outside. We would have likely walked past this man with little more than a polite greeting if it were not for his aggressive initiation of a conversation. When the man saw someone enter through the front door and begin to walk toward him, he would enthusiastically and with great confidence shout out, “I bet I know where you got your shoes!”