Expectations and Commitment

While I am trying to find out stuff about what I should write about at this rather late hour, I wonder what would actually happen if I just didn't post anything today. OH! I can talk about that!

Yes, I just found myself a topic - the temptation to not follow through on your commitments because things just don't go quite the way you were expecting.

I made a commitment a little over a year ago to update this blog every Monday. But I never expected that the Monday after Thanksgiving 2014, I would decide to sleep in much later than I ever have within the space of the last year.

Seeing as how I just want to move on with my day (my last day of Thanksgiving break), I don't want to "waste any time" writing a blog post that no one is going to read anyway.

Hey, the struggle is real. It's also not just something that plagues "Ryan the Blogger." It also plagues "Ryan the Classmate" if there is an assignment that a friend of mine asks for a bit of help with. It also plagues "Ryan the Christian" in that if I commit a certain time to the Lord and things don't go as expected leading up to that time, I may have difficulty staying tried and true on that task I committed myself to.

For instance, I have rather recently committed Wednesday evenings after my shift in the cafeteria to in-depth Bible study. At times when my shift is more stressful than usual, or that my shift goes longer than usual, I usually don't follow through on that commitment.

Honesty is a great thing, isn't it? The point is, there is a temptation in my life to change my commitments based off a difference in what I expect and what actually happens. And I imagine I am not alone when it comes to this temptation.

So, to comfort myself and anyone else who happens to struggle with the same temptations, no matter how unexpected events were to us, they transpired exactly as God knew they would. Indeed, they transpired exactly as He directed them to happen.

But that doesn't mean He's going to make it easy for us to follow through on our commitments, and keep us from being tempted at all. But hey, we do have these wonderful words about temptation in I Corinthians 10:13, 

"There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it."