Good morning! Well, I'm still "on the road" as they say, though it's not a road trip, it's waiting for the earliest flight I could get back to Fort Myers. I'm tempted to look at this as a huge inconvenience, but you don't need me to tell you that's not how I should see - how God wants me to see it.

First of all, we are very grateful that the hurricane missed us (this time), but now it was someone else's turn to get hit, so we remember in prayer those whose lives are disrupted. I don't actually know if there were fatalities, but I assume there were, and so we pray for the souls of the dead, and for the spiritual health of those left behind to grieve.

There's also a chance that the delay might give me an opportunity to visit a cousin in the hospital today (not really sure yet) but that could be the silver lining here. Time will tell.

I don't know why it's so hard to keep the proper perspective at all times, but it seems to be part of the (fallen) human condition that this is the case. I think I'm much better at this than I was as a younger man, and I can tell you that it's only through prayer that I have become better at seeing the hand of God in everyday things, and submitting to the will of God, even when I don't know what that is. And when I say "it's only through prayer," this is quite apart from whether any individual prayers were answered the way I had hoped, but it has everything to do with the effect of prayer itself - regular and deep prayer - on my spirit. Which only reinforces my conviction that the goal and purpose of prayer is primarily our sanctification and salvation, and we simply do not mature spiritually without it, and without making it a commitment in our lives.

Today - just for today - let's try to see inconveniences as opportunities to "recalculate" (like the GPS navigation) our intentions and expectations for the day. Perhaps what seems like an inconvenience is an opportunity to course correct back toward the will of God.