Beyond Our Control

You may have noticed - I didn't blog yesterday. As far as I recall, it was first time I missed a day of blogging (when I wasn't camping). I've come close many times, but every day, I've been able to type up at least some kind of blog post before (or at leas by) midnight. Except yesterday. Yet, I don't consider this a break in my so-far perfect blogging streak. I would have blogged yesterday afternoon, in fact, I have the blog post I wrote yesterday saved on my computer and ready to go, but that's when we lost our connection to the internet, and we won't get it back until some time on Monday. That's why I didn't blog yesterday, and why I won't blog tomorrow, either. Because I couldn't.

In life, somethings are beyond our control. There are some problems we can't solve and some tasks we can't accomplish. Sometimes, we show up late to work because our cars broke down, or because we get terribly sick. Once, I couldn't complete a homework assignment on time because I couldn't get accurate information as to what the assignment actually was. I ended up getting a perfect score on that assignment, not just because that teacher has a lenient late assignment policy, but because it wasn't my fault that it was late.

I think that God is at least as forgiving about obligations we can't keep because of circumstances beyond our control. He wouldn't hold our inabilities against us any more than we would hold a disability against anyone else. We excuse disabled people from standing for the National Anthem when they literally cannot stand, and I think I'm justified in excusing myself from blogging yesterday because I literally could not have blogged. Sure, theoretically, I could have blogged earlier in the day, when our internet was still working, but I didn't know our internet was going to go out, so I couldn't have planned for it. My inability to blog yesterday was linked to my inability to predict the future, and God probably doesn't hold that against me, either.

But you know what? Even though I do think that I was completely justified in not blogging yesterday, I feel kind of bad as I try to explain how justified I am. In a recent blog post, I said that a Paladin doesn't look for excuses, and now I feel like I'm making excuses. Perhaps I could have blogged yesterday. Maybe the Spirit had tried to prompt me to blog when I still could, but I ignored it or couldn't hear it. Maybe this is a bad example of a time when a person is justified by their inability to meet an obligation. Maybe I'm still "on the hook" for it.

To resolve that feeling, I plan to post yesterday's blog post as soon as I can - probably Monday, along with tomorrow's blog post, and a blog post for Monday as well. As I said, I've written yesterday's blog post already, and I'll write a blog post tomorrow, too, even though I know I won't be able to post it then. Maybe, instead of making excuses, I should be doing as much as I can to meet my obligation, even though actually meeting the obligation is beyond my power. When God asks us to do something we can't do, we shouldn't just give up. We should do what we can. I won't be able to blog tomorrow, but I will be able to spend some time with God's words and write a decent blog post to be posted later. It's not quite what I agreed to do, but I expect that, given the circumstances, God will understand.