When You’ve No Idea What’s About to Hit You

10PM in the evening, and I sidle up to my pretty wife and say, “Guess what anniversary we’ve got coming up…?” [blank look from her] “July 1st?”  “Oh yeah,” she said.  That day will ever be etched in our hearts; those minutes of late morning, and the seconds that ticked with temerity onward.

Days before that now surreal day in 2014 we had no idea what forecast was coming.  On that July 1st we received our forecast — a storm coming with 100 percent likelihood for devastation to our regions.  We had no idea when it would hit, and that storm brewed for four full months of days — 122 of them.

Days before we received news that our foetus was on a collision course with death we had no idea how life for us would change.  And life did not revert back to what it was.  It changed and it remained changed.  It still is changed.

That’s our truth.  It’s all our truth.  None of us can readily prepare for news like we received that July 1st.  We never know how inextricably vulnerable we are in life until life gives us a situation that turns our lives upside down.

Should we live in constant fear of that shocking moment when a new normal is foisted upon us?  No, never.  But neither should we enjoy a listless life thinking all things will remain the same.  Change is coming.  And it breaks sometimes in a drizzle after a long period of sunshine, or as a confusing fog, or as a ferocious storm.  Equally, a storm may clear and the best of change makes its way into our lives; as quickly as that storm came, may come hope.

When we’ve no idea what’s about to hit us we’re forgiven for being naïve.  It’s okay.  We couldn’t have been expected to know beforehand.  And we can only wrestle with a new reality as it in fact comes.

Facts are realities ever real, sometimes too real, and yet God is good, in trusting us to learn of our capacity to bear what inevitably breaks us time and again.  Somehow it’s in being broken time and again that God wrings growth and change, as miracles, through us.  And, as such, faith is reckoned and made real.

We learn so much about the fateful reality of life when we’re blindsided, and though it’s cruel, it still has God’s purpose; an incredibly meaningful purpose if we’ll only endure.

None of us know when or if our lives will change, but we can know for certain that there will be change.  Be ready, not taking the present for granted.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.