11 min
”Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth’s for Life’s Complex Journey” - Part Four Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough
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- Christianity
"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Four
Did you ever have one of those surreal moments when it seems like something snaps in your head and suddenly you see everything like you never saw it before? Have you experienced those times when things unexplainably shift and they don’t look at all the same as they did only a moment ago? When what was entirely familiar is no longer familiar in quite the way that it was before?
A lot of things can trigger these moments . . . an argument, a child leaving the home, a death, a job loss, a divorce, a birthday, unexpected contact from a long-lost friend or any number of similar events. In the middle of whatever this is, you’re suddenly able to see the reality of your life with a stunning, nearly razor-sharp clarity that you’ve never had before. It’s kind of like you were blind and you didn’t know it and in the briefest nanosecond, for the briefest nanosecond you were granted stunningly perfect vision. And with that perfect vision, everything looks perfectly different.
Suddenly, what we now see is familiar but strangely unfamiliar at the same time. We intimately know everything that we see around us but it’s entirely alien just the same. It looks different or not quite right. It’s my life but it’s not my life, or at least what I wanted my life to be. It’s what I’ve been living all along, but at the same time it’s not what I’ve been living, or what I thought I was living.
And we stand there rubbing our eyes because what we see is not stuff we saw before, or at least what we saw with the clarity that we see it now. In the emotional turmoil these rare moments create we’re often left asking “who am I and where am I?” And in the briefest nanosecond, in exactly the same way it came, this vision is gone. However, the memory of what those few incredible moments revealed is anything but gone.
What times like this most often reveal is the paralyzing reality that we are not where we intended to be. This was not the destination that we had mapped out as pimply-faced teens or adventurous young adults or giddy newlyweds. The line that we had drawn from those younger years forward in time didn’t go where we’re at now, or weren’t supposed to go here; to this place that we now realize we are. We never really considered the heading on our compass. And now we pick it up, shake it to make certain it’s actually working and we’re left realizing that it’s working perfectly but we didn’t follow it. And now we stand at some point far removed from, and possibly decades away from where we were supposed to be, or thought we were supposed to be.
What hits us really hard is that we didn’t fully realize the deviation from the path that our dreams had laid out so long ago. We got here and we didn’t even realize that we got here. But now we know it. And we’re standing deflated, attempting to figure out where we got so terribly off course, all the while madly calculating how many years we have left, and how many responsibilities we have on our plate in order to determine if we have the time and the freedom to ever get back on course.
Worse yet, some of us don’t even remember what the course was in order to retrace it. Others of us never set a course for ourselves in the first place; having allowed the winds of life and the currents of circumstance to bring us here. Whatever the case, there is this chilling, haunting sense that we are not where we wanted to be, and that the path intended to take us there may now be forever forfeited. We fear a life squandered. And the question wildly reverberates in a near panic, “how did I get here?”
I Am Where I Am
At these times we can certainly pull out our tattered life map, grab whatever compass we’ve used over the years, or review the saved settings on our personal or relational or spiritual GPS. We can then hunker down ove
"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Four
Did you ever have one of those surreal moments when it seems like something snaps in your head and suddenly you see everything like you never saw it before? Have you experienced those times when things unexplainably shift and they don’t look at all the same as they did only a moment ago? When what was entirely familiar is no longer familiar in quite the way that it was before?
A lot of things can trigger these moments . . . an argument, a child leaving the home, a death, a job loss, a divorce, a birthday, unexpected contact from a long-lost friend or any number of similar events. In the middle of whatever this is, you’re suddenly able to see the reality of your life with a stunning, nearly razor-sharp clarity that you’ve never had before. It’s kind of like you were blind and you didn’t know it and in the briefest nanosecond, for the briefest nanosecond you were granted stunningly perfect vision. And with that perfect vision, everything looks perfectly different.
Suddenly, what we now see is familiar but strangely unfamiliar at the same time. We intimately know everything that we see around us but it’s entirely alien just the same. It looks different or not quite right. It’s my life but it’s not my life, or at least what I wanted my life to be. It’s what I’ve been living all along, but at the same time it’s not what I’ve been living, or what I thought I was living.
And we stand there rubbing our eyes because what we see is not stuff we saw before, or at least what we saw with the clarity that we see it now. In the emotional turmoil these rare moments create we’re often left asking “who am I and where am I?” And in the briefest nanosecond, in exactly the same way it came, this vision is gone. However, the memory of what those few incredible moments revealed is anything but gone.
What times like this most often reveal is the paralyzing reality that we are not where we intended to be. This was not the destination that we had mapped out as pimply-faced teens or adventurous young adults or giddy newlyweds. The line that we had drawn from those younger years forward in time didn’t go where we’re at now, or weren’t supposed to go here; to this place that we now realize we are. We never really considered the heading on our compass. And now we pick it up, shake it to make certain it’s actually working and we’re left realizing that it’s working perfectly but we didn’t follow it. And now we stand at some point far removed from, and possibly decades away from where we were supposed to be, or thought we were supposed to be.
What hits us really hard is that we didn’t fully realize the deviation from the path that our dreams had laid out so long ago. We got here and we didn’t even realize that we got here. But now we know it. And we’re standing deflated, attempting to figure out where we got so terribly off course, all the while madly calculating how many years we have left, and how many responsibilities we have on our plate in order to determine if we have the time and the freedom to ever get back on course.
Worse yet, some of us don’t even remember what the course was in order to retrace it. Others of us never set a course for ourselves in the first place; having allowed the winds of life and the currents of circumstance to bring us here. Whatever the case, there is this chilling, haunting sense that we are not where we wanted to be, and that the path intended to take us there may now be forever forfeited. We fear a life squandered. And the question wildly reverberates in a near panic, “how did I get here?”
I Am Where I Am
At these times we can certainly pull out our tattered life map, grab whatever compass we’ve used over the years, or review the saved settings on our personal or relational or spiritual GPS. We can then hunker down ove
11 min