Note: Chaplain Peter Hartwig will be sharing a Daily Devotional between now and Sunday, October 13. Greenies: remember to check your student e-mail for the link to Wednesday’s 11 a.m. virtual chapel service on Zoom. All family members are welcome!
Greetings from St. Joseph’s Chapel. While our community is unexpectedly scattered all around the world, we’ll be offering a week-day devotional as an ongoing connection to the spiritual pillar that upholds Christ School. Hopefully just a quick read each day can help us get our bearings in this unusual time. Let me share one quick story and one small thought.
In college, my friends occasionally played a game that I think we called “Drop Point.”
Two teams, two cars, two runners. Each team would blindfold a “runner” and drop them off somewhere in Albemarle County. You’d drive the most circuitous route you could take to the most obscure area you could find. You’d drop off the runner and then you had to get on the phone with your team’s runner (this was before Find my Friends) to find each other. The first team back to the original departure point with their runner won. Try it some time.
I was a first-round pick. It’s not so much that I have a great sense of direction. It’s just that I was a townie – I grew up in the same town where I went to college. I had 18 more years of back roads, shortcuts, and familiar sights than everyone else. I almost always knew where I was, but my friends usually jumped out of the car pretty turned around.
When you don’t know where you are, it can be hard to function much less to compete. That’s true in just about every area of life: on a road trip, at work, in our relationships. And lots of us feel pretty disoriented right now.
Five days ago, we were getting ready for the 98th Asheville School Game. Alumni were making their way back to campus. Tents were set up. Meals were prepared. The teams were ready to compete. I had (mostly) written a homily for a Saturday morning Memorial Eucharist to commemorate the alumni we lost last year.
And now… we’re all over the world. We may or may not be with our own families. We may not have a schedule to structure our time. We may be in an unfamiliar place – even if we stayed in Asheville. We may feel lost, at least a little bit.
But here is the good news, Greenies: it’s not always your job to know the way. In times of disorientation, we don’t always need to see the way forward. Because, we Christians believe, that’s God’s job. It is God who is our guide, God who knows the next right thing to do. It is God’s job to be God.
Our job is just to trust.
Of course, many of us need to make important decisions in the coming days and weeks. But perhaps there is some relief in reminding ourselves of this: what God knows matters vastly more than what we know. We can find our orientation in that. Ultimately, it is God who saves, not we who save ourselves.
I invite you to pray alongside me this short prayer if you yourself are looking to get your bearings at the beginning of this week:
Almighty God – the One whose Son walked upon the wind and the waves of storms – we ask that You would make Yourself available to us in these disorienting times. Be our true north in the decisions we make and the insights we offer. Be our foundation when the ground beneath us shakes. Anchor us in Yourself, in Your Son, and in Your Spirit. All this we pray through Jesus, the bright and early morning star. Amen.