Justin Rizzo is out to get me.

Ok, that may not accurately speak of his intentions, but I'll tell you this...when I wander in to the prayer room, full of my own concerns and a tinge of self pity, and I hear he and his band resting on the lyric "These momentary, light afflictions are working in me / the eternal weight of glory, the eternal weight of glory", it wrecks me.

The song yanks me back to a tv interview I saw in the 1993.

The year before, Dennis Byrd was injured in an NFL game, permanently paralized from the neck down. In his 4th year of pro football, he had an amazing career in front of him, and it was gone in a second.

Months later, during a bedside interview in his rehab room, a reporter commented that the football player must have a very strong faith. Dennis said quietly “Yes, I am a believer in Jesus Christ.”

Of course, the reporter couldn't help but ask how Dennis reconciled his injury with his faith in God. Dennis lifted his his head slightly off the pillow, looked past the reporter, right in to the camera, and with his back broken and muscles already starting to atrophy, gave the best statement on perspective I've ever heard.

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us...Romans 8:18.

Here was a man who knew that God saw the end from the beginning*, and wasn't going to shipwreck the present on the rocks of the past. I have much to learn about looking forward - as far forward as necessary - to see the rising of the sun.

*Incidentally, Byrd shocked the world by walking out of the hospital ten weeks after his injury. One must wonder what might have happened had his perspective been different than it was.