It's an interesting place I tread these days, and as I'm walking I'm wondering about the lives around me. The lives that intersect with mine. Why they're there and what part I am to play. If it's arrogance to be thinking I play a role beyond an intersection, a mere cosmic coincidence that our paths have crossed.
I'm a believer, so I want to pin all of life on a God I believe exists, I believe comforts me even when I'm smack in the middle of things I can't fully grasp or when I'm so content I forget that He gave it all to me.
Although my mind winds in ways that aren't the typical. I believe that it-my life and all it's stuff and people-were both freely given to me by this God of mine and given as answers to prayers, to deep heart requests, and that they are things or relationships earned.
There's been some triggers to get my brain wandering in this direction today. A sermon about work. A number of different blogs about perspective. My own ordinary life.
Every moment of this life we're creating our legacy, a tiny little bit of God's legacy if you will. Our footsteps may be washed from the shore by the waves or blown off the dirt by the wind, but they were there and they reflected the walk we were taking.
Was it a walk of legacy?
Well, they all are, but was it a walk of legacy that you want to leave, that you want to have your name, your life, your heart and soul inscribed across? Did you leave ripples that were gentle and pushing towards safe harbor or were your ripples the kind that drove someone or something under to drown?
In a way we choose. Well, we don't, but we do. Ultimately we control nothing in this life except how we choose to respond to the life that happens to us. We all know of those people whose every moment of existance is struggle tainted with pain and more struggle but yet they somehow are light and joy and it isn't the fake kind. Somehow, somewhere in their lives they chose to be that way and at every turn of heartache in their life, they continue to choose to be joy and promise and hope for the rest of us.
There are others who are brought down to the pit by the everyday struggles or even big struggles. Their perspectives are tainted with misery and fear and it spreads like a spill on a crooked table, running just a little to the low side until it puddles sticky on the floor, meaning to be mopped up but left to dry and collect ants.
Most of us are somewhere in the middle. We get derailed from time to time. We choose to be brought under by life now and again. Some where in it all though, we find our way and return to lightness again. We find our way back to hope. To being hope.
And so it brings me back around to the wondering. Wondering about the lives around mine. Who is shaping who? Why are our lives intersecting and what is my part to play in it all? Do I have a part at all?
