R.A.D.I.C.A.L. Thoughts
“Many of us go through life with only a fuzzy sense of where we are going.” ~ Reinventing Your Life: How to Break Free From Negative Life Patterns by Jeffrey Young, PhD and Janet Klosko, PhD.
Where am I going? Many of us don’t even think much about that question until disaster hits. Something like divorce or cancer or death of a person or death of a dream hits us in the face, and then we are forced to think about these questions. Where am I going in life? What is life all about? What am I here for? Is life just a constant struggle to nowhere in particular? As the doctors above point out, our sense of where we’re going is often at best “fuzzy.” We seem mostly just tossed about by events and happenings that we have little or no control over. Is there even a destination we can pin down? When I start pondering these questions, I think about one of my favorite books, The Hobbit. If you come upon the characters of that book in the middle of the story, they are just stumbling along, fighting battles, surviving catastrophes, at the brink of disaster and even death at every turn. “What’s the use?” Bilbo Baggins could say to himself. But if you look at the story from a point far above and away, you see that Bilbo, an ordinary person, is on an extra-ordinary journey. He was asked to play a part in a bigger story. From my reading, the story is about Eternal purposes. It’s a real life battle between good and evil; darkness and light. And though often the characters seem to be stumbling along on their own and fighting the storms and the demons just by their own determination and wit, we discover they are guided by the light of Truth, Justice, Good, Love, and Doing Right. Though the players are often demoralized and discouraged and some even die, the “place” they are going is real and shining in the distance. What place are you going? What bigger story are you part of? Find the God story that is being lived out in your life, and suddenly that fuzzy place in the distance will become flooded with light. With that new vision, you will undertake your daily battles with a bright, bold purpose and peace and power.
“Later in one of his talks, Jesus said to the people, ‘I am the Light of the world. So if you follow me, you won’t be stumbling through the darkness, for living light will flood your path.” John 8:12 (The Living Bible)
