Choose Your Own Adventure
When I was younger, I used to read "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. After a preliminary pass or two, I would flip through and survey the good and bad endings, working back one step or maybe a couple. The pages are numbered and even then I was passable at numbers. In my engineer mind, the theory was that I could work all the way back through the possibilities and know the choices to take and the choices to avoid to get to the ending I wanted. What usually happened was that I could recognize when I was about to reach a bad end with one or two steps to go and backtrack until I could "choose a different adventure".
My life is becoming pretty much the same way. I can locate the good ends and the bad ends to the story threads. I can discern the step or maybe two steps leading to most of the ends. However, I want to trace those ends back to the choices I'm presented with now so that I can follow an optimal path to where I want to go. I want to choose an adventure where I know the ending. That may or may not take some of the excitement out of it, but "it's the journey, not the destination that matters", right?
Instead, my life is more like the book - I see "here and now" and I see "there and then", but in between is just frayed ends and yawning emptiness. Sometimes my life is more like the books than I want to admit - some pages have lots of words, others only a few. I don't get to choose how long I stay on each page; God (the one who has written the book of my life) chooses how much he writes at each step. Then there are the pages with just one choice - "keep going" - that also describes some of my days. That's OK in a way because it means I can't make the wrong choice, but it also means that I'm locked into whatever path I'm on.
I started writing out of frustration, but along the way, the underlying emotion was revealed as fear. What I saw as frustration at not knowing the path ahead of me was also (from a different perspective) fear of not being in control. Pretty much the opposite of faith. Yep, I'm still working on my stuff. Why am I looking for that well-defined adventure path? Because, though I believe God has my best interests in mind, sometimes I still don't quite trust what I cannot see or reasonably assume.
Where does that leave me? Well, I could sit in the dark place of my frustration and/or fear or I could choose to walk out into the light. Again. Out of the dark into the light is a frequent theme in my life.
I choose, once again, to believe that God is who He says He is and that He'll do everything He's ever promised to do. I choose to believe that God is writing the adventure I'm on and that He will take care of me.
I still might wish (just a little) that He'd make the steps not quite as big, though...
My life is becoming pretty much the same way. I can locate the good ends and the bad ends to the story threads. I can discern the step or maybe two steps leading to most of the ends. However, I want to trace those ends back to the choices I'm presented with now so that I can follow an optimal path to where I want to go. I want to choose an adventure where I know the ending. That may or may not take some of the excitement out of it, but "it's the journey, not the destination that matters", right?
Instead, my life is more like the book - I see "here and now" and I see "there and then", but in between is just frayed ends and yawning emptiness. Sometimes my life is more like the books than I want to admit - some pages have lots of words, others only a few. I don't get to choose how long I stay on each page; God (the one who has written the book of my life) chooses how much he writes at each step. Then there are the pages with just one choice - "keep going" - that also describes some of my days. That's OK in a way because it means I can't make the wrong choice, but it also means that I'm locked into whatever path I'm on.
I started writing out of frustration, but along the way, the underlying emotion was revealed as fear. What I saw as frustration at not knowing the path ahead of me was also (from a different perspective) fear of not being in control. Pretty much the opposite of faith. Yep, I'm still working on my stuff. Why am I looking for that well-defined adventure path? Because, though I believe God has my best interests in mind, sometimes I still don't quite trust what I cannot see or reasonably assume.
Where does that leave me? Well, I could sit in the dark place of my frustration and/or fear or I could choose to walk out into the light. Again. Out of the dark into the light is a frequent theme in my life.
I choose, once again, to believe that God is who He says He is and that He'll do everything He's ever promised to do. I choose to believe that God is writing the adventure I'm on and that He will take care of me.
I still might wish (just a little) that He'd make the steps not quite as big, though...
posted by The student of life at 11:21 PM
1 Comments:
Wow! I really identified with this post. That is almost exactly the same kind of approach I take to life. (must be the engineer in me)
I didn't read many choose your own adventure books but I describe a similar feeling with games. When I start a new game I will often read the manual, the wiki, and the discussion boards before I get too far into the game. All this work so that I can *know* that I am playing the game *right*. So that I know that I will be playing the game so that I come out the *best*. If a game is not well balanced (for example, some text based internet games (including some on facebook)) the *right* way to play is obviously the better one. But, if the game developer has put some thought into balancing, then the choices are more interesting and require more research and thought to figure out.
The result of all this is that I know where I will end up, that I have some control over how I will perform.
I tend to take this same philosophy with life. For example, I have read many, many books about dating/courting/relationships so that I will know how to do it *right* (so far I seem to be doing pretty good). Will my research bear fruit? That remains to be seen. But, knowing God and his propensity to step out of the box we put him in, I'm guessing I have quite a few surprises in store for me. Frankly, that scares me.
But the good thing is that God is walking with me in this journey. God is still working with me, in the way that will best make me into a fully mature man, dependent on Him and trusting Him fully. But my journey is still beginning. While there's many stories of people who have gone before, there's no manuals, no wiki pages, no *right* way to do it. (ok, so there's discussion boards, but that goes along with the stories) All I can do is keep following the path God lays out for me, and try not to look too far ahead.
To the journey!
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