I find myself making plans for tomorrow, setting goals, pressing onward and then I prepare for the unexpected. Life turns on the decisions we make and it makes a mockery of our carefully orchestrated plans. The internal outline I drew for my life as a youth resembles very little of the road map of reality for my life; my internal life plan was like a carefully crafted pencil sketch and my reality looks a little more like the crayon scribbled sketch of a toddler. I did say that I wanted to have 4 boys when I was 12 years old - unbelievably I do have 4 boys who far exceed any of my expectations or hope.
Life also turns on the decisions we make. Decisions of every day - minute or magnificent - change the roads we follow, the places we go, the people we orbit around, and ultimately alter the course of our lives. The whole or our lives turns on the choices we make in each day and there is is something compelling and also daunting about that reality.
In the past two weeks I've been able to spend time (though never enough!) with friends whom I have known for decades, and friends from my childhood. We have been separated by hundreds of miles for many years, so our lives are not parallel, but they are intersecting and each of those intersecting points is a beautiful highlight on the timeline of my own life. I have watched each of their lives (from a distance), I have shared in their victories, I have grieved in their losses, and I have been rich for knowing and loving them. The battles we have each fought are unique and none of us would have chosen to be in the fight. Yet, I see how through the trials, through the hardship, because of the impossible things we have been required to do, we have each found strength that is not innate. We have been molded into softer, less callous versions of ourselves and we are able to see one another with clearer vision/insight.
I am deeply grateful for the passage of time with all it brings with it; I do not know what tomorrow holds, but I know that my life is rich for the people who have filled it. Hope is a dangerous thing; it can steal from today for a tomorrow that may never come. My hope is in today, in the promises I know to be true!
2 comments:
My vision of what surrounds me is that 'everything belongs'
Hope is a vision, a promise we cling to, and too often, it seems constructed from the stuff of dreams and yet it cannot rob. It implants and nurtures. It enables and keeps us from drowning. It supplies what we lack so we do not suffocate.
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