Time

Time has a funny way of changing one’s perspective, if you let it.  The process is almost natural.  One anticipates the path ahead because of the path travelled.  One can see beyond the horizon with the images lingering from days gone by.  On even finds laughter in their soul when a loop repeats, more often than not due to one’s willful ignorance of the education that always comes with time.  It is an odd realization.  Yesterday’s prayer gives way to the reality of living in the present.  What was hope finds itself reshaped by the opportunities at hand.  Fears, uncertainties, and doubts mix in a medley of forced consumption.
 
I find myself in Singapore almost four decades after my teen years. It is an eerie state of being.  Everything has changed in the intervening years, or has it?  I have learned.  I am maturing in ways that speak of my value and priorities.  This is true, is it not?  Yesterday’s lessons of self, power, and exploitation are giving way to compassion, mercy, and a sense of purpose.  As I look out at a dawn filled with colors, hope, contrast, fear, and ultimately movement, I find myself looking in a mirror.  Not much has really changed.  Even as I travel towards the East Coast, I find myself feeling alone, longing to be with family.  I feel it now just as I remember the same feeling on a Saturday night on a beach decades ago.  Not much has really changed.
 
  I want to heed the warnings I ignored then.  If I try it on my own, I can hear the words of warning.  Will I be successful?  “Fat chance.  You'd be grasping at straws that are already in the fire, a fire that is even now raging.  Your ‘experts’ are in it and won't get out.  It's not a fire for cooking venison stew, not a fire to warm you on a winter night!”  (Isaiah 47.14)
 
Today I want to remember the past and the future with God.  I can see with clarity.  I can walk with Hope.