I had some drama at the end of last week. My plan to share my thoughts online using an alias ran into a snag, and I’ve had to make adjustments.

Anyway, things are fixed now as well as they can be, so we continue. But what was interesting to me was that all my closest friends thought that I must be ready to jump off a cliff because of the setback. Well, no. I just took a couple of days to think about it and then did the best I could to fix it, and that’s it.

So I thought about why they might be so concerned and I came up with three ideas. First, they thought that because I always talk about plans, responsibilities, expectations and obligations so much that I would flip out if anything went wrong. Second, they thought that because I have anxiety left over from being stuck in daycare so much that I would be shattered by the setback. Third, some of my male friends thought that I should be really angry and fight against the injustice.

Well, here’s why I didn’t get depressed or angry.

1. First, and most importantly, it’s important to understand that in Christianity, salvation is a free gift of God. God’s love for me is not conditional on me achieving specific results, even though I am very serious about achieving specific results. Although I’m not a guy who has a past full of wild sins, I have something else – I have a lot of missed opportunities. I could have succeeded better and been more effective and influential. In my first job, I got a ton of stock options, but we were acquired 1 month before they vested. The gain in our stock price would have been worth $100,000 to me. I also missed a chance to intern with a small company that was later acquired by Oracle. I chose instead to intern with a much larger company that eventually went bankrupt. I failed an on-site interview with a great small company because I mentioned my conservative politics (my manager-to-be had run at the state level as a Democrat). They also got acquired by Oracle.

And there have been many more near misses. And even now, some of the plans I made (marriage, PhD) are 12 years and 8 years behind schedule, respectively. I’ve been forced to scramble to find other options in order to make a difference. But that’s OK, because I’m not under pressure to earn my way to Heaven here. God is in control. Being faithful doesn’t mean you get everything you plan to achieve, it just means being serious and self-sacrificial when you make decisions, and then leave the rest to God. It means reacting to targets of opportunity when your primary and secondary targets are not available.

2. Second, God has done an excellent job of strengthening me to recover from the daycare anxiety. He’s done it in three ways.

First, my education and career went well enough that I have kept up with my financial goals. Having enough money to survive all the terrible things I can imagine happening to me is a big calming influence on me. And this was a gift from God. I believe that my finances and my career are not things that I achieved, but things that God gave me in order for me to be able to mentor and assist others with the experience gained from being given these gifts. God gave these things to me so that I could fill a role with others – advising them on their decisions about education and career.

God also gave me a string of unexpected disasters to experience to build up my toughness, e.g. – running over a large possum at night while on the way back from a J. Warner Wallace event, or being rear-ended by a college student driving her Dad’s SUV. When these things happened to me early in my life, I would cry like Niagara Falls. I was raised to think that everything had to be “perfect” growing up – my working mom was always stressed out and aggressive. But now, when bad things happen, I’m much less phased. Sometimes, people run away from challenges if they don’t learn that it’s OK to fail, but thanks to God leading me, I didn’t end up like that. I kept trying.

Finally, the influence of supportive Christian women in my life has helped me a lot. It’s amazing how one action – the first time a Christian woman put her hand on my face – has stayed with me, and it makes everything terrible seem so easy to bear with. Whenever things go wrong, I just think of that day. It was a big deal. When you wait a long time for it, and when the woman understands you and approves of you, it makes a difference – for the rest of your life.

3. Third, I believe that God is sovereign so that I don’t have to defend myself all the time when things go wrong. Sometimes, when things go wrong, the most important thing to do is to not fix it, and just concentrate on being calm and polite to everyone around you.  Sometimes, God has reasons for allowing me to fail or get hurt. And since I can’t see everything he can see, what’s the point in thinking that I have to get upset every time someone disrespects me or sets me back? I don’t. If God wanted me to make a huge difference right away, he could make me do that. But he’s not going to do anything that will threaten his most important goal for me, and that’s making sure I get where I need to be after my life is finished. With all the focus on plans and goals, it can be easy to forget that this is what really matters.

So all of that is just to say that I am not earning my way to Heaven here – the most important thing to know about me is that God the Father has saved me through his Son, Jesus. The rest of my life is just me reacting to that as respectfully and effectively as I can, and not really caring much what people think of me. That doesn’t mean I’m going to do whatever I want, but it does mean that if things don’t go perfectly, then the most important thing about me isn’t going to be affected. At all. There is a great contentment in understanding these things when you are trying to interpret unexpected setbacks.

By the way, please like the new Facebook page for the blog if you haven’t already. It has fewer likes than the old page did right now, but we’ll get back up there.