Provocation is mostly associated with taunting someone to anger. But there are good sides to provocation.
Hello House💜 One can be provoked to success. We all need to be provoked in areas we are weak when we need to be strong.
What needs to be called forth in our lives? Maybe some hidden talent we feel to timid to show. We need to evoke that which is in us that we feel we will be ridiculed for.
The thing about provocation, is that it’s mostly external, unlike courage that is mostly internal.
I remember this time last year. I wanted to update my knowledge of fashion starting with practising what I had been taught until I perfected at least most of what I had learnt. Then I would use this year to build on last year’s perfection.
That was the plan.
Then someone I couldn’t refuse gave me a complicated sewing project, that I couldn’t figure out. It rubs one the wrong way when you are given a class 3 project, at the time you are trying to master class 2 project.
I felt taunted by the work and the person who gave me the work, though I’m sure that wasn’t intended. She kept telling me it was simple and implying that if I couldn’t do it, she would take it elsewhere. She told me she didn’t like what I knew how to sew, so I had to make what she wanted.
I was stuck for an entire year.
Because unless I did her project I couldn’t do any other. Just thinking about it makes me angry, (guess I need to forgive) because I didn’t sew for a whole year, because one project hit me below the belt.
We got into several arguments over the matter. I kept trying to explain to her that fabric will be ruined, if I began something I didn’t know how to do.
She wasn’t listening. She wanted it done well and now. But all that didn’t help me one way or the other.
So around February, God answered my prayers and I finally got it. It was something I knew but was applied in a different way. Guess I would have understood sooner if my plan to practice had scaled through.
What really ignited the right provocation was an older friend I had only spoken to on phone and interacted with on social media, for less than two years.
She gave me some design ideas and gave me the ultimatum to make one for myself in less than a week!
Well, that lit the fire underneath me, to speed up previous project. Sadly I haven’t done what she asked me to, but because of what she said and how she said it, I was able to sew for the first time in a year! And then finish in two weeks what paralysed my courage for a year!
It dawned on me that there’s the right provocation and the wrong provocation.
One can be provoked to anger, helplessness, fear and discouragement.
One can also be provoked to progress, faith, hope and love. The right provocation calls forth the right feelings, thoughts and actions that were too stuck with fear.
It is therefore important that we don’t insist on who should provoke the stimulus we need to move forward. It could come from anybody, mostly from unexpected places.
Once we identify who our right provoking agents are, we need to accept them and see what we can do for them, not to ‘even the scores’, but to show genuine appreciation for igniting the fire of progress underneath us.
It matters not how long someone has been in our lives, but how well someone understands us, loves and encourages us.
The wrong provoking agents should be loved at a distance, while the right provoking agents should be kept close.
If you don’t have a right provoking agent in your life, pray for one.
Shalom.🦋
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/provoke/
Musings of a Sanguine Christian Woman 