Oh, sweet perspective.

School is pretty rough these days.  Well, one class in particular is pretty rough.  I made a not so hot (and I mean for real, not so hot) grade on a test this week, and it got to the point where I was wondering if I am perhaps pursuing the wrong career... So yeah, good times, since I've already invested a year and a half and quite a bit of money into this thing.

But today is a new day.  I'm still not thrilled with my grade, and I still have issues with the class in general, but life goes on, right?  Today I am being reminded that my worth and significance does not hang on my academic performance, and I am very very thankful for that.  My hope is not in school, and you know what?  It doesn't even rest in the outcome of an election.  Yet both of these things often occupy my mind and bring with them much anxiety. 

As with every time that life seems just too overwhelming, I am reminded that there is a deep abiding peace that can only come from Christ Jesus.  And I must seek it constantly, because the worries of this life are constant.  

So as the advent season quickly approaches, with weighty news of reconciliation and peace for the whole world, I am reminded that the peace can only permeate the world if it rests in our very souls.  And it is something that I have to seek at all times, because in the busyness and anxiety of this life, it is often a fleeting experience before I discover the weight of the world on my shoulders again.

So today I am praying another prayer of Walter Brueggeman:

"You God, Lord and Sovereign, 

you God, lover and partner, 

You are God of all our possibilities.

You preside over all our comings and goings,

       all our wealth and our poverty, 

       all our sickness and all our health, 

       all our despair and all our hope, 

       all our living and all our dying, 

And we are grateful.

You are God of all our impossibilities.

You have presided over the emancipations

and healings of our mothers and fathers;

you have presided over the wondrous transformations in our 

own lives.

you have and will preside over those parts of our lives that

we imagine to be closed.

And we are grateful.

So be your true self, enacting the things impossible for us, 

that we might yet be whole among the blind who see and 

   the dead who are raised.

that we may yet witness your will for peace, 

   your vision for justice, 

   your vetoing all our killing fields.

At the outset of this day,

we place our lives in your strong hands. 

Before the end of this day,

do newness among us in the very places where 

  we are tired in fear,

  we are exhausted in guilt,

  we are spent in anxiety.

Make all things new, we pray in the new-making name of Jesus."

And to that I say, Amen.