It's Not Over, 'Til . . .

It looks like next week I and the rest of the government work force will be able to continue government operations. This after three iterations of examining the requirements for which my office would be responsible to maintain critical mission support. Will there be a fourth?

Over. What a sense of finality. Yet, everything in this life has a beginning and an end. We don't impact either one. But we do impact the time between. We live life, hopefully realizing that life is much more than just ourselves. We imagine that we have so much to contribute - and we do, but our offering is more often than not very different from our imagining. I never would have thought of an Air Force career, nor the work I do now.

We move in our circles, listening and talking, looking for the next thing. Always on the move. Are we never satisfied? Content? And we look wistfully at the horizon before us, trying to glimpse over the curve to see the end. The goal we have set for ourselves. All the while, life continues to move forward, and in many instances passes us by. We are always working to finish just so we can go on to the next thing.

Where is our purpose? What is our motivation? Do we sense the higher calling that work is not work? What greater sense of satisfaction is there than to know that your work and contributions have played even the smallest part of a bigger plan of making things right? And where is this ideal found in what should be a very noble venture - government?

God told Samuel to not fret over Israel asking for a king for they had rejected God as their king. Samuel warned Israel that their earthly king would lord it over them, and they did. But God gave them a king anyway, and government is appropriate if not necessary to preserve God's order. When all people acknowledge that God alone is sovereign, the people sense that what they do is for a much bigger need than themselves. Left to make our own way, the self became all important, and corruption becomes rampant.

But it's not over. God is victorious. He won. This is the first half of the message of Easter. We are just waiting for the culmination of his plan. Even then it is not over, for everyone will live in eternity. The question is where? In God's presence our out of it? The second half of the Easter message is that he has made a way to him that gives us access to him as Father, and he has prepared a place for us in his kingdom where there will be no more pain or suffering. And all will be for his glory. Forever and ever without end. Amen.