My Inspiration: See the Best

See the Best

By William King | Email: kingwilliam189@gmail.com | image courtesy: emilymadill.com

A faultfinder is defined as “a person given to harsh judgments and to finding faults.” None of us want to wear that label or be around a faultfinder. It’s so easy to see what’s wrong with another person or situations we find ourselves in. There’s no perfect friend, job, church.

Life is filled with imperfections, so we can’t escape the fact that there will be much to criticize. Our natural minds tend to always focus on the negative and it causes us to find fault. It’s interesting that soon after the people of Israel had been freed from slavery in Egypt, they started complaining about their hardships in the wilderness.

One of the complaints was that they were tired of manna, the bread that God provided supernaturally for them every single day. They grumbled, “Now we have lost our appetite, we never see anything but this manna!” (Numbers 11:6). That complaint got them thinking about “the cucumbers” they used to eat in captivity.

They let the food they had become tired of become more important than their freedom from slavery. God is taking all of us somewhere and like the people of Israel, we have everything we need right now to get where He’s taking us. That’s where the Israelites missed it. They were looking at circumstances.

Today, you’re going to have many opportunities to find fault. You can’t stop all the negative thoughts you have about people and situations, but you can stop giving those thoughts life by speaking them out. You can watch what you say by stepping back and reminding yourself that complaining only finds the worst in situations. Don’t give it life.

What should you do? The apostle Paul says, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen” (Ephesians 4:29). Let’s zip up the complaints, stay the course and be grateful to God.