Well, this really hit home.

Over at The Anchoress, the venerable A herself has knocked one out of the park on the subject of prayer and fasting:

I’m thinking we’re in the middle of a mystery, that this whole, odd, unpredictable and too-long election season has been run along one of those threads connecting things seen and unseen, and we are so disoriented today that we do not really know which outcome is the outcome pleasing to God, and meant – by Him – to draw us into Himself.

The Holy Spirit, of course, uses whatever He chooses, to bring things about. Who knows if we are meant to be shaken, soundly, in order to be roused from our complacency and the status quo?

The sense I have is that the status quo won’t do any longer. That we are stagnant, too deeply comfortable in too much of the muck and mud of materialism, and we’ve lost sight of what and who we are meant to cling to.

So, let us not worry. Let us not wring our hands. For the Christian, anyway, I believe we are in a moment where the rubber meets the road. How do you respond to that? With trust that no matter what things seem like, that “all things work for good and to the Glory of God” or with wringing hands, depression and doubt?

If you are doubting…if you are thinking that only electoral victory – as defined by the world – will be a validation of either the existence of God, or His Intent, then you need to hunker down into scripture and get out of your own head. Do you believe that Christ is the Son of God, or do you not? If you do, do you really think that this election is all there is, and that a loss here is somehow static, and works to nothing in God’s purpose?

Visit her site for the rest.

When my wife and I were discerning whether I should chuck 26 years at a powerful and cash-rich Fortune 500 company in favor of the relatively modest means and aspirations of church employment, she was all “Please, God, give us x.” There was a lot of hand-wringing about what sort of buyout I might receive, and for how long. I gently admonished her: “No. It’s thy will be done.” God ain’t Santa Claus. And, in the end, I got a very generous package.

And so I have taken to directing all my prayer not to get something that I want or need, but to accept what is given to me, whatever it might be. God’s purposes aren’t ours. His plans aren’t man’s. The stone that is rejected becomes the cornerstone, as this Sunday’s gospel reminds us. Even the unlikeliest of outcomes and most unwanted of problems can be, by the grace of God, transformed.

Two thousand years ago, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a lot of Christ’s followers who thought things had turned out they way they’d hoped on Good Friday.