Let go. Abandon yourself totally to God. Only in that is there fulfillment of your purpose. Let the Lord regulate your schedule. Take time to appreciate what and who is around you or, as George Eliot warned, “The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”
With abandonment to God, with regulating our pace, with appreciating each moment, we are ready for anything, whatever the surprise, no matter how unexpected may be a turn in life. All of us experience these. Meditate on it: what have been the biggest surprises, and perhaps shocks, in your life?
Looking back, did they bear meaning?
Or do they remain enigmas?
Were you prepared for them?
We’d enjoy hearing what you say.
As mentioned in a previous commentary, a short while ago a neighbor of ours rushed his wife to the hospital. She is in the last stages of bladder cancer and suddenly was spiking a fever (104-F). They were a very tight couple, rarely leaving the home but for local errands and — in the past couple years — trips to a branch of the Mayo Clinic for surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
One wondered how he would take it when she finally passed, alone in a house, on an isolated cul-du-sac. Married fifty-eight years. Not so old, but not young. Devoted to one another. Now, she was expected to die any day. It was a surprise she’d made it much past Christmas.
They got in an SUV and headed in a hurry up U.S. 1 in Florida to the hospital. That’s when death occurred — not her, but him: from a heart attack, while at the wheel, the car veering off the road and striking a tree at about forty-five miles an hour, slightly injuring her while he was in all likelihood dead before impact. Their daughter, in the backseat, escaped injury. It shocked everyone.
The point: she, expected not to be here, is alive. He was suddenly… gone.
You never know. You never know what life will send you. You never know how people will react. You never know what will occur in the world. Only God knows. Sometimes we get an inkling, perhaps even a premonition. Or something simply “doesn’t feel right.” We may not have peace about a circumstance.
But life is like that: here today, gone tomorrow, full of surprise — never certain which “tomorrow” it will be, or whether it will be today. Only with abandonment are we prepared for any eventuality. For whom will the bell toll?
It’s why it’s so important to start each day with prayer, and to live each day, and each hour, as if it is our last, ready for everything, taking time to smell the roses, to see God’s Plan unfold, to take part in that plan to the fullness of our purpose, savoring the golden moments that lead to eternity.
[resources: special price for both A Life of Blessings and The God of Miracles; also Michael Brown retreat, Virginia]