Put Not Your Trust In Princes

From Psalm 146:

I will praise the Lord all my life;

I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.

Do not put your trust in princes,

in human beings, who cannot save.

When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;

on that very day their plans come to nothing.

Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob,

whose hope is in the Lord their God.

Yesterday was an odd day, one fraught with theological implications. I started the day by going to morning Mass. I wasn't particularly reverent, my mind wandered all over the place, but at least I was there, participating.

At work, looking at the statistics from our intranet, in April we hit all-time traffic records in three of our four platforms and missed the fourth because April was a 30-day month, not a 31-day month. The records we broke were from March. Our intranet has been around for well over 3 years and the stats have gone like that. It's always growing because, for the most part, the workforce finds it very like the Internet and easy to use.

Later in the day, I attended the weekly SharePoint ambush meeting. It's a stacked group put together by our leadership (local, not top-level corporate) to justify their lust for SharePoint. No one in the room save maybe two or three of us has any technical skills or web literacy at all. I sat there for 90 minutes on the receiving end of great, big dollops of hate. As I'm no longer allowed to fire back, I smiled and nodded at the idiocy.

The day after our products hit all-time highs in popularity.

I had an epiphany recently and came to understand Psalm 146. The things I've done for the Church have never let me down. Yes, there are political struggles and scandals in the Church, but that's not what I'm talking about. When I've surrendered myself to God's will and worked at the food bank or supported my wife as she volunteers at Hospice or when I've gone to Adoration, it's never like this.

God doesn't assemble Integrated Product Teams specifically designed to beat the tar out of me to provide political cover to get what He wants.

It will all work out in the end, but it's been an important learning experience. Put not your trust in princes, to be sure.

I never really trusted him anyway.