Questionable Decisions Can Have Glorious Consequences

Today’s reading: Hebrews 11:1-7

It’s the middle of the month, so the payment on my “wasted” student loan is on my mind again. This month’s money has been in the mail for several days, but I usually end up reflecting on that frustrating episode of my life around the payment’s due date, the 14th of each month.

Today is the 13th. Close enough. Its not surprising that today’s reading about faith would lead to thoughts of that loan.

I left my graduate school, and my dream of becoming a journalism professor, in 2003 over a matter or principal. The school’s leaders made an egregious lapse in ethical judgement, and I decided it was time for me to move on — just a few weeks away from finishing my master’s degree and beginning a promising career in academia.

Important people in my life still question that decision, and I will concede that it has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income (and countless amounts of lost prestige) over the last decade. A woman hired me to rake leaves in her garden today. I doubt that’s how I would have spent this morning, had I finished that degree.

But, like all of the great Biblical figures mentioned in today’s reading, I am proud to stick by the decision. God gave me the nerve to make it, and so, in the end, it will prove glorious. (Actually, it is already glorious — because, of course, God inspired it. People have not yet acknowledged that glory.) I am proud to report that I have not lost faith.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Verse 1)

Noah, Enoch, Abel, and Abraham made questionable decisions too. (Not to mention Moses, David, and even Jesus.) So I’ll just keep letting the (ultimately victorious) stories of those men  be my inspiration as I write that student loan check each month.

Thanks be to God for eternal hope that always answers gloriously for life’s “questionable” decisions.