Dances with Providence

Reflections on Life & the Unexpected

God’s talking to us all the time from many directions. Occasionally we are listening and hear him from an unexpected direction—like Garth Brooks, for example:

And now, I’m glad I didn’t know
The way it all would end, the way it all would go
Our lives are better left to chance
I could have missed the pain, but I’d have had to miss
The dance.

This is from Brooks’s song, “The Dance.” Garth Brooks hit it big during a period when I wasn’t listening to country music or, maybe, any music at all. So the other day when I heard this line, I didn’t even know who was singing. I had to look it up.

Into the Unknown

There have been things in my life that had a quality that matched this. There have been things I’ve chosen to do that, had I known how hard they were going to be, I would not have done, but having done them, I would not have skipped them. In each case, there was a good deal of pain and discomfort involved, but, along with those, a great deal of growth.

I took a Rotary Group Study Exchange to Russia in the year 2000. I’ve mostly written about parts of that trip that were heartwarming, thought-provoking, or humorous. I left out the parts where there was discomfort, anger, fear, or culture shock. There were times when these were all going on at once. Had I known only the feelings I was going to experience, I never would have gone.

But that trip changed my life. I started writing seriously because of that trip, and there have been few things other than my marriage or the births of my children that have changed and improved my life in such a positive way.

This brings to mind the 2016 movie Arrival, which is based on Ted Chiang’s science fiction short story, “The Story of Your Life.” The story’s heroine learns an alien language that rewires her brain so that she can remember the future in addition to the past. She sees that she is going to have a wonderful daughter who becomes sick and dies at a young age. She sees that the daughter’s father will become alienated from her and divorce her. Nevertheless, regardless of these unpleasant truths, she goes ahead and marries the man and gives birth to the daughter who is doomed to die.

The message is that it is all worth it.

Though presented in the science fiction format, it conveys a truth. When you get married, either the marriage will end in a divorce or one of you will eventually die. There may be some exceptions I’ve not thought of, like alien abduction, but that’s about it. When you give birth to a child, that child will one day die. When you were born, the one thing that was certain about your life from the beginning was that one day it would end.

We Do It Anyway

But we do it anyway. We marry and are given in marriage. We birth children. We do these things because there are precious moments in life and precious people we meet that are worth it.

In C. S. Lewis’s book A Grief Observed he says, “We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for.” In the movie Shadowlands about the relationship between Lewis and his wife Joy, the dying Joy puts it this way: “It’s all part of the deal.”

Very few of us are like the translator in Arrival who chose the path knowing what it held for her. The people who do that sort of thing are usually saints. For the rest of us, there is ignorance and taking our chances, all the while trusting in Providence to work things out.