Week 2: Preparation
Thank you for taking the time to sit with our annual Advent Devotionals. As we move into a busy month of exams and holiday preparation, we invite you to sit with the words of members of the TCU community. Our fourth devotional comes from TCU student Tazman Turner. Taz is a member of the TCU Wesley and the TCU Word of Truth Gospel Choir.
Words to ponder
The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the LORD.
– Proverbs 21:31
Make our horse ready
In the stress-filled environment of college, I am grateful to have a secret weapon: my faith in God. I have fully imbibed Jesus’s exhortation in Matthew 6 to not worry and I trust him to bring about good outcomes especially in my academic pursuits. But sometimes, I confuse faith with complacency. Life is full of diversions. Campus ministries, student organizations, sponsored programs and idle pursuits like Netflix and YouTube pull my attention in a thousand different directions, and each of them seems more interesting than a textbook. It can be easy to shirk my studying in favor of entertainment and excuse my laziness with a confident “God will take care of it.” For a while, He did take care of it, but eventually, the time came to teach me a lesson.
’m not accustomed to poor grades, so when I receive one, it gets my attention. I had walked into this exam supremely confident, only to be humbled by my substandard performance. “Where did I go wrong?” I asked God. “I had faith in You to get me through. Why did you let me fail?” His answer, like it often does, came in the form of a scripture. Proverbs 21:31 explains that the results are always up to the Lord, like Jesus says in Matthew, but it reminds us that we have make our horse ready, in other words, do some preparation ourselves. God will continue to walk with me through the struggles of my life, and He’ll even carry the day, but I need to remember to honor Him by putting in the proper amount of work.
Let us pray
Lord Our God, Thank you for your promise that you will never abandon us and that our destiny is in your hands. Help us to remember that the proper response to your unending grace is devotion to you, and help us to honor you by developing an ethic of hard work and humility.
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