Ever had a complaint about someone or something, but had no recourse for addressing it, driving you to mumble and grumble to anyone who would listen about it? Welcome to the human race!
I am writing this as I sit on hold to help my dad get maps installed for his Garmin iQue 3600 GPS navigation system. (This is an awesome product; my best friend Caleb got me interested in it, and that piqued my dad's interest, so much that my stepmother got one for him for an anniversary gift.)
Anyway recently the Lord has been convicting me (an inveterate griper about problems with inanimate objects) that when it comes to dealing with things that frustrate me, complaining to people who have no control over the problem is not the thing to do ("Do all things without complaining or arguing", as St. Paul taught the Philippians).
Now when I can address a problem, and feel comfortable doing so, I think it's entirely appropriate to talk to those responsible for the problem. But God should chiefly be our Complaint Department. I've seen even trivial things handled much more effectively through prayer than through griping and complaining.
There are two things that I pray for — that the people responsible for the offense fix it, and for meekness on my part in tolerating it (see my post on the lost virtue of meekness, which essentially is serenity in the face of provocation). A complaint can be legitimate, but if we react badly to it, that's not cool.
I encountered an ATM recently that has a horrendous user interface. The soft keys on the side of the monitor don't line up properly with the labels on the screen. Worse, sometimes the top two keys are used, sometimes the bottom two, sometimes the middle two &mdash but I'm starting to complain. Anyway, I've decided to pray for the ... uh, people who designed this thing.
I also pray for management that is in my estimation incompetent: for people who make what I consider to be errors in judgment. Of course, not everything that appears at first glance with publically available information to be an error in judgment really is so. This is the true reason we need to consider God to be our chief ombudsman: perception is not always reality. It's so easy for us to jump to conclusions based on very little evidence, judging on the basis of our own experience (and our biases). And easy to forget that we don't have the big picture. That's why our Lord tells us not to judge, to leave such judgment to Him.
I think it's especially important to keep this in mind when we run across priests and bishops who do not do what we expect or want them to do. Instead of getting angry and frustrated, instead of venting to our friends or impugning the reputation of the cleric, ought we not channel that passion and energy into praying for the principals involved? Is this not a much more productive and salutary use of our time?
I think the patron saint of complaints should be Moses, because he had to endure so many complaints of the Israelites. I also consider him the patron saint of meekness, because he went from someone who killed a man when provoked to someone who was so meek that God considered striking a miraculous rock twice to be a sin worthy of death. (What I mean is that obviously God would not have imposed that punishment unless he had made Moses so meek, that his responsibility for the incident was tremendous.)
So with respect to my complaint, it turned out that what looked like a big problem with the Garmin stuff had a pretty simple and straightforward explanation. Problems are frequently smaller than they first appear.
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