This morning, as I write this, I am watching the recording we made of the Packer game before the power went out. When I called my brother last night, he let slip that the Packers won, and today’s paper told me that this victory over Detroit was another career highlight for Brett Favre, who completed 20 straight passes, setting a team record, and tying his career record with seven 300-yard games in a season.

As I watch this game, knowing how it will end, Favre’s first quarter fumble didn’t bother me. Nor did the way Detroit dominated the first quarter. I am enjoying it in a different way, free of anxiety.

This is the way life should be for Christians. We know how all of this ends. We have a happy ending ahead of us. We should not be paralyzed with worry or defeated by our troubles. From the aspect of eternity, our problems are not going to mean all that much.

True, this is not the best way to view football, since a big part of the fun is the suspense, tension, and agonizing, all of which accentuate the hope, the relief, and the joy that we also experience in the game as it unfolds in time. And this too speaks to us of life and why we go through what we do.

Yesterday at 3:20 p.m. our electricity went out, as did that of 10,000 of our neighbors. It didn’t come back on until 9:25 p.m. Fortunately, we had our Thanksgiving Feast just after noon. We built a fire in our new fireplace, lit candles, and spent the evening like the pilgrims and our other pre-electricity forebears for thousands of years did. Well, they probably didn’t play Lord of the Rings Monopoly by firelight, but still. It was actually a very pleasant evening.

But my heart goes out to everyone here who planned to have their Thanksgiving dinner in the evening! I don’t know what they did or how they coped. Everywhere else in the country where I have lived, power outages have been taken care of within an hour. This is the third time in the year and a half since I’ve been in Virginia that we’ve had a power outage of six hours or more. I realize that Dominion Power must have had its workers off for the holiday, but that would not have been the problem those other times. And we didn’t even have a bad storm, just some wind that would be a stiff breeze in the midwest. So I don’t know why Virginia’s power grid is so fragile and why it takes so long to put it to rights.

Still, I am thankful for the gift of electricity.