Published on 09/2/2008

The more prepared we are, the more useful to God's Kingdom we become. As we work, he works.

"Spared a direct hit, New Orleans exhales"; "A new twist in the motherhood debate"; "McCain team scrambles to rescript show." These headlines from today's New York Times and Wall Street Journal would have made little sense this time last week, but today you know exactly what they're talking about.

On Friday, who saw Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the Republican VP nominee? Who knew then that her daughter's pregnancy would make headline news on Tuesday? Who knew on Saturday where Gustav would make landfall on Monday? Could things have been more challenging for Sen. McCain's campaign or for coastal residents? Absolutely.

Apparently the McCain campaign was prepared for the weekend's disclosures. As a result, the governor and her family were ready to respond to the media firestorm which has enveloped them. Apparently the tragic lessons learned from Katrina helped the coastal evacuation to be much more effective than three years before. The Louisiana Superdome was a filthy near-morgue after Katrina; it wasn't even used after Gustav.

Now all political eyes are on the Republican Convention and Gov. Palin's prime-time speech later this week. No one knows how she'll do, but she'll be as prepared as political professionals can make her. Now all meteorological eyes are on Hanna, another superstorm boiling in the Caribbean. No one knows where it will make landfall, but the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard are more prepared than ever before.

I went to college on an academic scholarship. My benefactor pulled me aside after graduation and told me something I've never forgotten: "The Holy Spirit has a strange affinity for the trained mind." Growing up in Pharaoh's palace, Moses had no idea he would one day use Egyptian culture and politics to face down the most powerful man on earth. Learning Greek and Roman culture in the cosmopolitan town of Tarsus, Paul could never have imagined that he would quote Stoic poets on Mars Hill and win members of the famed Areopagus to faith in Jesus.

The more prepared we are, the more useful to God's Kingdom we become. As we work, he works. When we "do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do" (Ephesians 2:10), our lives count for his glory and our good. The more we study and obey his word, seek him in prayer, and develop the gifts he has given to us, the more prepared we are for the future only he can see. The key to significance is simple: be faithful to the last word you heard from God, and open to the next. Are you?