Providence of the Strange and Ordinary

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I’ve been thinking about providence lately.  For many of us it is so easy to feel that we are one paycheck away from oblivion and one tragedy away from losing our hope, or worse, our sanity.

Life does not come at me that way.  I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been blessed with a joyful disposition or because I am a person of faith.

I cannot remember a time in my life when I did not feel providence watching over me.  Even though I have lost dear ones, and I know my own demise draws closer each day, I have cultivated a lifelong trust that life will work out okay.

This is providence.  It is a way life is experienced.  We trust that our God of love economizes infinity with everything our faith requires to know joy and never lose hope.

Think about how life works out in the creation of family.  A lot of planning goes into making a family, and making a bridge, but then life comes along like a flood and makes us start all over. 

The American Dream family is recognizable by all of us who watch television.  A boy and a girl court for a long time.  He proposes.  She accepts.  A wedding is dialed up.  Rings and vows are exchanged.  A honeymoon happens. A marriage moves into the future.

After a while, the couple plans to have children.  The children grow up, go to college, repeat the process all over again, and then there are grandchildren falling out of the sky.

 

That’s the American Dream family revised to perfection with a lot of what life does to people left on the cutting floor.  For most of us, that family never existed.  In fact, for many of us family is more of a struggle with how to cope with all the cruel ways we were treated by those who should love us.

For those of us who were cruel, how do we cope? 

Many of us move on and make family happen nonetheless though our hearts are conflicted and torn.

Is that not then how we persevere...by living?  I say it is because there is a providence underlying existence that makes our faith to go on possible.

Life is ineffable.  Life makes its own plans, does its own thing.  Life folds and unfolds as if it were blanketing all space and time. 

Roads less traveled are not that much different than congested streets.  Our journey through life leads us to who we become.

Sometimes all Life needs to find its ineffable way is a moment.  Sometimes that moment can be something simple like a kiss. 

The first time I kissed my wife, I was oblivious to what was coursing through her mind. For one thing, I was surprised that she wanted to kiss me on our first date.  I learned later something I never suspected.

That one kiss would be everything to her.  If I slopped it up, she would have stopped answering my phone calls.  If my kiss felt dry and hard like sandstone, we would have gone our separate ways forever.  She was at a stage in her life when she did not want to waste her time on a crappy kisser.

I had no idea that one kiss would change my life forever.  The kiss we kissed lingers still. 

We dated for three years before we married.  We started a family with her daughters and cats, and my cats, and the family we brought with us. 

Even though our experiences of family were less than ideal, we have managed with persistence and patience to craft a family in a unit that resembles abstract art.  We have become an accidental family, an unlikely family, not nuclear but still radiating.

    

I say unlikely because the constellation of events that led to that kiss and to this now, this family, is as mysterious as God.  It might never have happened. 

If I had paused a moment longer at a traffic light, or decided I was too tired to go shopping at the Paper and Supply store, or postponed shopping until after supper, then that kiss would have never happened.

That kiss ended our first date, yet began our journey together.  It is a metaphor for a metaphor.  It shows that things can just work out if we do not despair.  That is providence.

Life unfolds.  We must wait for it, snuggle within it, and love those times we were warmed by it during those times it feels yanked away.

Blessings…