Don’t Worry, Every Day is Like This!

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 13, 2008

So today we started with an ice storm which prevented some of our staff from getting to work on time. What’s worse, power was out at one of our major clients so that all their computer services were down. Then we had a management meeting where we spent most of our time rethinking and changing the decisions we had made two days before. Fortunately, after a couple of hours, the client’s power came back up. But five minutes later, our power went down.

There was not a single person in our office who hadn’t wanted to get some important work done today. What would have been cause for rejoicing for school kids quickly became a major obstacle to progress for Trinity. We decided to go out to lunch and await God’s good pleasure. If even He couldn’t get the power on by the time we got back, we’d call it a day. Besides, the restaurant had working bathrooms.

How true it is that man proposes but God disposes! While time is in one sense a great gift, it is a gift with strings. It’s a lot like work hours, really. An employee’s time belongs to the company he works for. The boss has the final say about how that time is to be used, and the employee’s success depends directly on how well he picks up the boss’s signals. It’s the same with life. When things happen to interrupt our own plans, we can presume that the Boss has something else in mind for us. He’s sending us a signal.

I can’t speak for others, but my own usual reaction to such signals is annoyance and complaint. I’m very project-oriented. I wake up in the morning expecting to get certain things done, and sometimes there’s hell to pay if I’m thwarted. (“Hell to pay” is an apt expression; such anger is indeed a payment to the devil.) It is not uncommon for me to forget that even the ability to get out of bed and get started in the morning is a great blessing. But, again, it is not an unlimited gift. In a deeper sense, everything we have is on loan. The time, the talent, the treasure: they all belong to the Company Store.

Time is for the doing of God’s will. It has no other purpose. Properly understood, no matter what happens, each and every day presents the same opportunity for success. The Letter to the Hebrews places these words from Psalm 40 on the lips of Christ at the moment of His Incarnation, the moment of his entry into time: “A body you have prepared for me…. Behold, I come to do your will, O God.” Thus it was for Our Lord; thus it is for us. It is what our days are, and what they should be. So we are not to worry. They are, really, all very much like this.