loss

Do you ever read the good Word and just think about 1 or 2 verses with the feeble attempt to wrap your mind around them? You just chew it over and over trying to digest what it means and once you think you have it figured out you come across someone's writings, a commentary, a sermon, and/or a conversation with someone who sheds a whole new light on the verse(s).
You just peel one layer to find millions more.
You look through the funnel and find out that there is so much more to learn.
Then the process starts all over again.
And its awesome.

Lately I have been thinking about Philippians 3:4-8. According to the ASPV (Aaron Standard Paraphrased Version) of this context Paul gives his impressive resume of all the "great stuff" that he did, but abruptly points out that what was "good" for him, he counts loss for Christ and then steps it up a notch by his generalization that everything that he thought was big and important for him is nothing but poop compared to the amazing privilege of knowing Christ. (Yea, I would encourage you to read this passage in your own version).

But what does that really mean?
Everything that we experience and do can fit into the category of poo vs. learning more about Christ?
As you can tell, I am still working on this one, but I think that I had a sliver of a glimpse of what this means today at work: I had completed an initial evaluation on a patient 2 weeks ago, which entails a lot of paper work filling this page out, checking off these boxes, signing here, having others sign over in that section, listing things there etc. Basically it is a real pain and takes a lot of time.
The patient had an appointment last week and we could not find the chart; however, the patient could not make the appointment so we rescheduled the appointment for this week, but the chart was still missing despite asking and looking everywhere in the unit.
No chart anywhere. So I had to redo the chart based on the notes I had made during the new eval. Filling everything back out, checking boxes here...you get the picture.
As I put the chart back in the chart room there was the original chart that "magically appeared." Arg!! Are you kidding? Everyone knew I was looking for it and it just showed up while I was pointlessly going back through making a new one.
Or was it pointless?
From my perspective I wasted my time doing something that I had already done, it served me no benefit. But what about Philippians 3?
How do I use this experience to learn more about Christ? Could it be that He "wastes" His time trying to teach me the same thing over and over and over and over, yet His love and mercy is never ending?
Could it be that He was trying to use me to be a witness to the other people at work in the fact that I was not to get all angry, throw stuff around, and try to find out who had the chart the whole time? Was I to remember Christ's reactions to others who despised Him by turning the other cheek?
I could go on and on, but basically if I get all upset and worked up about the injustice of missing charts it is about effective as a pile of warm poo, but by putting this experience through the lens of Philippians 3 I have the golden opportunity to learn more about Christ.
It is all a matter of our perspective.