How much time do we spend thinking about how we are living the moments our lives? How many times in our lives are we moving along, plodding through the minutes, the hours, the days, not really paying attention to what we are doing, just attempting to make it through each day without feeling too much of anything, anesthetized, just being, waiting for it to end so that we can sleep and wake up the next day and do the same? The sameness of one day fades into the next, we continue on each day, and the familiarity of the days becomes our life. We become increasingly numb to anything new, and continue to follow the same path.  And that path is a minefield.  Another twenty four hours to think the same as we always have, react to the day out of habit, continue the sameness because it is the way our life is, life has always been the same, and we let each day come and go unnoticed.  Then suddenly, life seems to stop, become stagnant, boring, irreversible, untidy, frightening, unclear, muddled, and confusing.  What is happening? Is this really my life? Isn’t there more than this? Why am I unhappy and unsettled?  Shouldn’t my life actually mean something?

Ahh, there it is. The bend in the road.  Many of us are faced with these realizations at some point in our lives.  A nudge from God to look around and see what choices we are making with the gift of life He has given us.  We move along day by day, doing what we think we should be doing, doing what others in our life think we should be doing, living our life unintentionally.  Until a mirror appears one day in our path, and no matter which way we turn, we cannot avoid that image of the culmination of choices we have made, though we fight and struggle not to look, to feel, to attempt in any way to think about changing away from the way we have always been.

The bend in the road.  The reflection from that mirror latches on to us, and we cannot turn away, because every time we try and turn away, there we are.  We open our eyes just a bit, and quickly close them, only to try and look again.  Oh, the pain of looking at who we have become.  And each time we look in the mirror, we begin to see the larger truth of who we are and what we have become, and after a while we let go of the hopelessness we originally felt, and begin to see in a different way.

We begin to see that the bend in the road is actually a gift from God.  He is giving us a picture of ourselves, to muse over, to contemplate, to learn.  And by giving us this gift, He also gives us the gift of the ability to change what we see in ourselves into greatness.  A second chance, a third chance, infinite chances to take the broken person we have become and make a new person.  A person who understands their own brokenness, learns to cherish who we are now and how we became that way through the choices that we made or did not make, and begin to build a self we can be proud of.  We can have an absolute new beginning in life any time we want.  We do not need to continue to be frightened of ourselves and the sameness in our lives.  We have been given the opportunity to see, to awaken from sleeping through life and become intentional beings, no longer suffering through each day in the pain of being ourselves.

“A bend in the road is not the end of the road…unless you fail to make the turn.” Helen Keller.

When we come to the bend in the road, and see the gift that God has given us…the ability to make the turn in our lives, we see we can become someone of value, of conscious intent.  We have the infinite ability to become what we want to be, what we were intended to be.  Life is a series of choices, unending and eternal… an opportunity for greatness.  We can now write the story of our lives going forward, “keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.” (Dinah Maria Mulock Craik)

And we grasp that opportunity, holding on so tightly to the truth that we can become something greater than we are at this moment.  Believing with unfathomable faith that God exists, and that He believes in us, cheering us on to become who He created us to be.  And He holds our hand gently, leading us out into the world, beside us as we go together to discover who he created us to be.