It has been a whole month and a day since my last post. With the new job and with school rushing towards finals, I have more on my plate than I care to eat. If this seems short, please don’t hold it against me, but do know that this is something I have been waking up to and going to bed with every day.

I don’t know how people who believe that the weight of the world is on their shoulders do it. I know that personally I would, and have, collapse every time something came up I didn’t think I could handle. The success or failure of a project that will effect the lives of others is enough to turn my desire to carry on into jelly. I lose interest, retreat into “other worlds” like video games or TV shows, and on my own power I might get the job done, but never with any quality.

Over the past few years I have begun to take solace in the idea that God is all powerful and, while he is working with broken people, will always bring about what he wants as best will carry out His will. This does not always mean that we will succeed. In fact, it means that we may fail miserably just so that God can teach us something more important. This has happened to me any number of times and looking back at those occasions, even through real pain, I can learn amazing things about myself and about God’s provisions for my life.

As I have begun to take this into my ongoing thought and applied it both to current situations and not simply to the past, it has given me great hope. Well, perhaps not always “great” hope, but it has meant the difference between laying down in failure and keeping on through strife. The knowledge that my part is only to do my best, and God will use it toward the best possible outcome for His will, takes the weight off of my shoulders and more importantly off of my heart.

I would like to insert this warning though: God’s power to enact God’s will is NOT an excuse for us to do nothing. Note that in the paragraphs above I never said that God takes over and I can go home. I really believe that God chooses to work through His people, and thus he gives us the ability to carry on. We still have work to do, and we are expected to do it, but we can do it knowing that our confidence does not lie in our own abilities, but in the abilities of God. And if we believe that God is all-powerful, then truly all things are possible though Him.

Pax,
-Paul Hart Cochran

**Post Script**
In thinking about my parents, and truly anyone who works in accounting on this wonderful holiday, Tax Day, I would like to add that is is not restricted to a traditional notion of “ministry.” I believe that everything here is as relevant to my work in seminary and in church as it is to my father’s work as an accountant, and even my wife’s work as a bartender. Truly, each of these jobs is where we are respectively called and God works through all of His people wherever He has called them. So, hang in there Dad! Sleep is on its way!