The Way Not Chosen

Life brings us all to moments we would never choose.  And, the longer we live, the more we find ourselves walking on such ground.  They can destroy us, or shape us.  To some degree it is our choice to make in each of those moments.  My life has been shaped for a long time by the first journey I took to a cementery when I was seven years old and my mother took me and my sister there to bury her husband and our Daddy.  It was my first encounter with a moment I never would have chosen and also my first remembered encounter with God.    

Losing those we love has a way of opening our eyes and hearts to what is eternal.  When I think about the beginning of a life of being aware of God, I go back to that very hard memory.  For the first time I started looking for Him.  For the first time I thought about heaven and eternity.  It was not something which came out of a mature faith for I was only a boy, but something which was born out of a desperate need for life to make sense.  No matter how old we become and no matter how mature our faith, we live as people who need the life we encounter to make sense.     

It is not always easy to see.  Sometimes it takes the hindsight born out of many passing years to see where God was at work in a time when He seemed to be absent and maybe even uncaring.  Our faith in God serves us a framework to live through the hard unthinkable moments.  Within it are those realities which enable us to put into perspective the realities which confound us.  From conception in the womb, our Creator God has been moving us on a path that eventually takes us Home where the light that first shined on us in the womb will shine upon us with such glory that earthly eyes would be blinded.  We are never alone.  We are never outside the plans He is working out in our lives and in the lives of those we love.  As we wait, we catch glimpses of what will one day be revealed fully and clearly to us.  Such is where God is alway drawing us even in those moments we would never choose.