Newly Elected

2 Peter 1:10  ¹⁰ Therefore, my brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election. For if you do these things, you will never stumble,

I always encourage those around me to never take a verse out of context, but today as I reflect on yesterday's mid-term election, I believe the message herein is applicable to those newly elected officials just as much as it is to you and me.  From my perspective America faces many troubling issues and while I believe a radical turn away from God is at the very core of these issues, some of them stem from our elected officials simply not doing their job.  If my facts are correct, the last time Congress actually passed a budget was in 1997.  That's one of their primary responsibilities, yet many argue that these omnibus spending bills etc are just as good.  I don't care how you slice it, failure to do your job is failure.  So to take a secular slant on this verse, I think our newly elected officials need to "confirm their calling" by doing their jobs for their constituents. 
Obviously these verses point to a higher calling - that which God has placed on our lives.  I can remember praying earnestly about college, my major, marriage, and so on.  I've always had a huge concern about answering a call from God.  I believe I've done so, although I confess that I often wonder if somehow I've missed my calling and should be elsewhere.  I believe that same earnestness needs to go into more mundane daily decisions such as how I deal with coworkers, how I interact with the people God puts in my life, how I treat my wife, etc, but I confess that so often I just get up and go about my routine asking God to bless me. 
I believe God wants to bless us, but like parents who only bless our children when they are obedient, our Heavenly Father can only bless us in consistency with His will.  We don't (or at least shouldn't) bless misbehavior, and God does not bless us when we stray outside His will.  So from my perspective, most of us have this relationship backwards.  WE decide what WE'RE going to do for God, WE make plans, WE seeks funding for our project, WE put programs into place, WE then pray that God will bless our plans.  Don't believe me?  Look up Acts ch. 1 wherein the Disciples set out to replace Judas and you'll see the modern church in action.  The Disciples decided the conditions of employment, nominated two eligible candidates, THEN they prayed.  We've never heard from Mathias since. 
How about us?  Do we make seeking and confirming God's call our first priority, or do we decide what we want to do and demand God bless our plans?  I think we need to be very careful about putting limits on God or defining what we're willing to do for him.  Getting things out of order puts us on the throne instead of God.  These verses tell us to confirm our calling.  What has God called you to do?  Are you seeking a call or making this stuff up as you go along and demanding the God of the universe to bless your plan?  I think this is a question we all need to address daily or we risk riding good intentions right out of God's will and right out of His ability to provide His blessing.  What do you think?