This has been a tough week. I am so tired, I feel like I have been hit by a truck. I wish I could say I am fatigued because of all of the hard work I have done around the house, or in my yard, but my weariness and exhaustion come from a much different experience.
I was humbled this week.
“All day long my dishonor is before me and my humiliation has overwhelmed me. Psalm 44:15 nasb This verse may seem a bit dramatic, but it is truly how I felt this week.
I used to dispatch for a police agency in the California, Bay Area, and have quite a bit of experience in handling emergencies and priority radio traffic. To be honest, coming to work for this much smaller police agency, in a much smaller and very crime free city, left me feeling like I was almost over qualified. (my pride talking)
Boy was I wrong.
Pride is such an ugly human condition. I wish I was immune to its seductive siren song. God made sure to break me of this flesh condition this week at work. No matter how hard I tried listening to my radio traffic, I wasn’t able to make out what the officers were saying. This is just unacceptable in the world of dispatching. The other dispatchers in the room were not very impressed. Needless to say, any prior experience respect I may have had, was wiped away with a twelve hour shift of my voice asking the officers to repeat themselves, over and over again.
Some people think that the emergencies we get from a 911 call, or from an emergency worked on the radio with police officers is the most stressful part of the job. I am here to tell you that that is not the case at all. The most stressful part of being a police/911 dispatcher is working a call well in the presence of all of your peers. The officers and the dispatchers in the room, hear and watch every single thing that you do. There are no mistakes missed, especially while you are training.
As a mother I can hear my children whisper my name while in a dead sleep in the middle of the night. I can translate most two year old language like the most qualified of linguists, and almost always, I am able to decipher the radio traffic of a police officer requesting his Code 7 (lunch), already with a mouth full of food. But on this particular day, by the middle of my shift, I was close to tears. I couldn’t make out the most uncomplicated radio traffic requests. It was then that it hit me, I was no doubt being humbled. I began praying silently to myself.
When I looked up the word “humble” in my Bible concordance today, I found it to be no coincidence that the word “humble” was right above the word “humiliation”. In my little world, God knows that the process of killing my pride is almost always humiliation which in our Christian walk, should bring godly humility.
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain (selfish) conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” Phil. 2:3
Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self. ~Charles Haddon Spurgeon
God changed my heart this week. In order to be made more like Jesus, humility is something that I need much work on. I know now that no matter how many armed robberies, homicides, or traffic pursuits I have worked, I am no better than any of these women that I work with now. That was made quite clear with my job performance this week. I can thankfully share that my last evening at work was much better. I had very little trouble at all understanding the radio traffic. I know it was due to my prayers and the prayers of my husband and friends who were praying for me.
I learned this week that with God, humiliation brings about humility. For that I am grateful and hopeful that this is one lesson, at least at work, I have hopefully learned.
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