Wellness and Your Irritability Threshold

IFLScience

In certain ways, wellness is like church ministry---we insist on complicating it when it's really so simple. Wellness is often shown as some complex system of making the body and mind healthy and measuring the result by some equally complex measures. 

Often, they make it look like wellness is looking and feeling like your favorite showbiz idol---trim and perfectly sculptured body, flawless skin, pretty face, glossy hair, gym life, and strict diet---which are all super costly to maintain. Church ministry is often like that, too. It has to have a lot of glamour, gimmicks, popularity, accomplishments, good publicity, exciting programs and lively activities which are all costly to maintain.

But really, wellness (like true ministry) is all about character.

It all boils down to this---what's your irritability threshold in your unguarded moments? How easily do you get pissed off (and do you get easily pissed off by simple things)?

You live a genuinely WELL LIFE only if you have good character, especially if you have lots of patience and kindness (especially when dealing with your subordinates). All your hard efforts at achieving wellness and your expenses for getting good health come to naught if you have a rotten character, especially when dealing with poor and unimportant folks.

One cool afternoon, while "idling" with God in the middle of a rice field in Nueva Ecija, this idea hit me: "Love is not irritable," [1 Corinthians 13.5 Good News Translation]. In another version, it says, "Love is not easily angered."

It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs.

Then it struck me. That is genuine wellness! That's what consists a WELL LIFE.

Then I asked myself, "What's my irritability threshold?" Do I easily get irritated? By what? I pondered on the thought and examined myself. God made me a very patient and quiet man (often I have incredible amounts of tolerance) by his grace (not of myself), but I realized how I still needed to have a lot more patience. God showed me the times I was impatient and how I sometimes got pissed off by simple things like flies landing on my nose or lips, or when people made me wait a lot and wasted my time.

God never thought his time was wasted even if his servants made him wait a lot, did he?

If you really learn to be so patient and kind, especially to the unkind or to people of lower ranks or disposition (and not get affected negatively by it), then you live a genuinely WELL LIFE. The same goes in church ministries. Big ministries and mega churches mean nothing if they have transformed you (or deformed you) into an unkind, impatient, self-centered and cruel creature.

Do you want to know if you're truly successful and living a WELL LIFE? Just check your irritability threshold.

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