Realizing on a Wednesday

Have you ever felt like everything happening in your life was being orchestrated just to reach you and make you see something that you had been missing? But I don’t think that actually covers it. Not just to “see” something, but to realize something you could never before grasp.

Anyone who is a parent would understand this kind of realization. The gravity of which, I couldn’t anticipate. Intellectually, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a parent. I even summoned up my deepest feelings to imagine how I might feel about my child. But when I became a parent, I realized that I couldn’t have imagined the capacity of which I would love my son, or the responsibility that came along with it. Becoming a parent changed me so profoundly that it was as if someone had turned the lights on, when I hadn’t even realized that I had spent my entire life in the dark before that moment.

There are many levels of discovery and realization. Some can be monumental, like becoming a parent. Some can be more subtle, as if you suddenly realized that the jumbled mess of your life wasn't really a mess but a masterpiece, intricately intertwined in such a way that you couldn’t have gotten there by accident. This type of realization has also happened to me before.

Sometimes I can be very hard headed. Unless there are numbers and science and logic to back it up, I can be quite the cynic. Although, that is probably too harsh of a term for what I am, I would say that I am more so pragmatic. I guess that is why I became an engineer. But sometimes life unfolds in such a way that God’s purpose can’t be mistaken.

My mother and father have been married for 36 years now. The feat of which does not escape me. So, I grew up with the impression that I would never be divorced, and that those who did divorce either didn’t try or didn’t enter into the marriage with the gravity it required. Needless to say, I found myself in that very place. At the age of 25, I got a divorce. No matter the surrounding circumstances, it left me in a tailspin. I felt like I had let myself and everyone I knew down. I felt so alone and depressed. It was a very hard time for me.

I was living in South Florida at the time. I had lived away from home and away from my family for a number of years. However, the year prior to my divorce and the toughest stage of my life, my parents decided to also move to South Florida. This was not a casual decision for them. They, and pretty much all of the rest of my family, had lived in Dallas their entire lives. At the time, I couldn’t have anticipated how much I would be needing them. It was just nice to have them close. But then, my life got nearly too difficult to bear, and my parents were able to be there for me when I needed them most.

Once I got through that difficult time, I found that I was ready to move on. I was hesitant to go though, because I didn’t want to leave them behind when they had come all that way to be with me. Here is where God tied the bow for me and then hit me over the head so I could see His work. I hesitantly chose to move to Mobile. The same week that I told my parents this, my mother learned that they would be closing her office there in Florida. She had transferred there from Dallas and gotten a promotion by doing so, since that was a division that was only located in South Florida. So, guess where they chose to relocate her division when they closed that office? Back to Dallas, back home! As if that weren’t enough, the move date set by her work was the same week that I had already planned to move myself. And they paid to move her back as well.

Signed, sealed, and delivered.

All of this is to say, that I have had the experience of coming to important realizations in my life. Realizations that I couldn’t have otherwise imagined or that I would have otherwise stubbornly missed. So, the benefit of my experience has taught me to not let these things go by unnoticed, because sometimes there are greater meanings to the normal occasions in life.