Looking Back

Do you wish you could see the future? Are you sure?

Before Karen & I had been married for 5 years, she was involved in a very serious auto accident. She was at the end of a day on her job as a reporter. I was three hours away doing my weekly stint at school. A full-size Olds going about 50 m.p.h. hit her car directly on the driver's door. She was, thank God, driving a '65 Chevy Impala, and all of that steel and Providence combined to save her life.

Days before, she had learned that she was pregnant. As I drove up I-75 that night towards her hospital, the initial assurances from an ER nurse wrestled with images of losing both her and our unknown child. Thankfully, she proved as tough as the '65 Chevy she was driving.

The journeys we are on involve going on past surprises, mistakes, and sometimes outright disasters. She made it through that first pregnancy with the aid of a wheelchair, crutches, determination, and faith, but it was not the road we had pictured in those first moments of learning about a new life entering the world.

In the years since, both family & dear friends have gone through events that detour, sometimes cruelly, the route we thought we were going to travel. That's why I think there is a kind of grace at work in our inability to foresee the future. I think most of us would run like thieves if we knew up front all that we would have to handle. As it is, shock, duty, and sometimes plain luck work together to get us through this one day in which we live, and move, and have our being.

THE BLOG'S NAME comes from the beginning of Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. As the book begins, Lewis' protagonist (Ransom) is in a foul mood. He has been denied a night's lodging in the village of Much Nadderby, and now his walking tour has become something like a sprint to reach the next village before nightfall. What he doesn't know is that a far greater journey is beginning - one that will literally take him to other worlds where he will see wonders beyond his imagination and mysteries that will make sense of some of the central Mysteries of his own existence. That's how I see us living many of our days.

Walking on past former goals and dreams, often grumbling (or weeping) over our shoulders at what has been lost, we journey on to learn that there are still wonders in store beyond the unexpected, unwanted, changes which have forced their way into our lives. It is not the road we imagined or planned for that carries us on to our ultimate goal, but the road that we are really and truly on - the one with Nadderby behind, and the true journey of a Lifetime ahead.

- Steve