I once heard an acquaintance say that she had come to a new realization that she didn’t need to plan everything out. All she needed, she said, was to follow the next step and trust that God will show her the rest of the path when the time comes.
Hmpf, I thought. Maybe that sounds good for her, but I didn’t even know what that meant. Not worry about the future? Not try to micromanage everything? Not try to guess every possibility in an effort to control every little thing that happens in life? Yea, not for me.
I didn’t understand this concept as it was so foreign to me. For so long, I equated control with morality. To control everything was to be good. To have something happen that was out of my control or that (horror of horrors) I hadn’t anticipated was a travesty. A crime against everything good. A crime against purity. A crime of neglect.
And if those words sound overblown and exaggerated, trust me, they aren’t. Those extreme ideas about control led me down many a treacherous path in my day.
The problem is that human beings can’t live like that and maintain sanity. The world is unpredictable, and our place in it is unpredictable.
There’s been a lot in the news lately about terminal cancer because of that poor woman in Oregon who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and is choosing (wrongfully in my opinion) to end her life on November 1st.
Every time I read about it or hear about it or read another opinion about it, I have to mentally block the emotional part of my brain off. It hits too close. It touches parts of me I don’t want touched. It’s something I cannot control. See, my fear is not of death. My fear is of my children having to grow up without me. That’s a concept and a fear too great for me to really put into words at this moment. It is my single greatest fear.
So since this is all over the news and since it’s a huge fear of mine and since there is nothing I can do to control things and ensure that I won’t befall some horrible cancer-ridden fate, I did the only rational thing I could think of when I was no longer able to block it from my emotions. I panicked. My breathing got heavier, my hands started to shake, my heart started pounding more strongly against my chest as I imagined having to tell my children of a horrible fate we must all go through together.
And through one of the panic attacks brought on by these stories, Mae started to cry upstairs. I went up into her room, and I started to rock her back to sleep. I looked at her eyes fluttering under her eye lids. I felt the warmth of her breath. I felt the peace in her slumber. And I remembered back to those words of wisdom I had heard all those years ago.
I can’t plan out every aspect of my journey. I can’t shield us all from pain. I can’t anticipate all of our potential heartbreaks and fend off their advances.
All I can do now is take the next step. I can love. I can forgive. I can relish in gratitude. I can make certain that if a tomorrow fails to materialize that the beauty of the yesterdays can live on eternal. And I can trust that by one step at a time I can create a life of beauty even if it’s not one of certainty.
We aren’t promised tomorrow. None of us are. We aren’t promised stability. But we are given the ability to stand strong in the middle of all doubt and uncertainty and live our life by the coinciding principles of love, faith, and beauty.
All we are promised is now. All we must focus on is now. And that can be incredibly liberating.