I have come to the realization that no matter how sincerely I intend to execute a well-lived life, something always goes wrong and life takes an unforeseen turn to dark places I never meant to go. This is ancient wisdom. Eve for example, bit the fruit and gave the rest to her husband because she thought it was beautiful, delicious, and would make them wise. What a bad piece of decision-making that turned out to be. Those millions of us born after the event — who have no idea whether knowledgeofgoodandevil fruit is sweet or sour, crisp or gooey, crunches or drips down your chin — have been toiling hard, enduring painful periods, and making similar though less epically bad decisions ever since. Regrets are inevitable.
I came to this realization in my 50’s. Old enough to have given all the good intentions a really good go, and to have collected enough wrong turns to not know which to go back and correct if given the chance, or exactly what to tell myself if the opportunity to send back some really useful foreknowledge ever presented itself. Life, it seems, is a great web of miscalculations and looking back at them can only make you giddy and nauseated. I’m sure each time Eve reached for a tree bark tampon, she told herself for the millionth time that the knowledgeofgoodandevil fruit was highly overrated, and she probably sinned a little farther by thinking God would have done better if He had told her that instead of forbidding it, and maybe some additional advice about avoiding serpents would have been helpful. Yet here we all are, toiling and cramping. “Maybe if’s . . .” are not so helpful.
From youth to death we wind our way through mountain roads we expected to be straight and flat. Years after we thought we would have arrived, we find ourselves camped in a canyon somewhere with callused feet and worn out maps. And if we’ve done a few things right, we have a couple of children that love us and a spouse we couldn’t live without and we think, “It’s really not so bad, this life in this canyon.” But it’s not where we meant to be. It’s not what we had planned at all. And the deep ache of that in a quiet moment can drive a knife through the soul.
But unlike me, the One who put the tree in the garden, all beautiful and delicious, knew exactly what He was doing. There were no miscalculations and no wrong turns ahead. The maps He makes always lead to where He is going and He always gets there by the direct route, right on time.
We sit in the canyon with Job looking at unexpected terrain that God Himself has brought us to. Scraping our sores, we ponder a God who doesn’t see things our way. This God who hangs the earth on nothing, who draws the boundaries between water and land, between light and darkness, who shakes the pillars of heaven and calms the sea, this God has plans. Big plans. We can only see the fringe of Him, but He has made a way for us to know Him and know Him well. This God who loves us, leads us through dark places but not to them. The place He is leading us to is more beautiful, joyful, glorious, happy, wonderful, than any place we ever set out to find.
Of course we’re not satisfied here. It’s not our home. “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come,” Hebrews 13:14. “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” Luke 12:32. The path to the kingdom is unexpected. It goes through a forbidden fruit, a cross, a resurrection and “suffering that is not worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed to us,” Romans 8:18. It calls to us and the ache in our heart waits eagerly for it.
