Perhaps one of my favorite lines from a Tom Hanks movie (or any movie for that matter) came from Forrest Gump:
Jenny, I don't know if Momma was right or if - if it's Lieutenant Dan. I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental - like on a breeze, but I - I think maybe it's both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.
I remember talking to my pastor, Rich one time back when I was still learning what it meant to be Christian. I had seen so many Christians in school, who repeated the same lines and said the same things, so I picked up some of those lines myself. Rich had asked me what it was that I wanted to do when I got through school. You know, what my career was going to be. I responded with the typical Christian answer, “well I’m still trying to see what it is that God wants me to do.” I was shocked and moved when he responded, “Don’t you think you could also figure out what you want to do and maybe God will bless that?”
Forrest Gump was so right when he said, “maybe it’s both”. Maybe our destiny is that we float around accidental-like on the breeze. But even then, God conducts the breeze because, after all, isn’t the breeze His orchestra?
The afternoon before I embarked on this journey of self-discovery (or so I hope that’s what this journey is) I sat down on a friend’s couch and happened to grab a book that I used to love to read. It’s a book that I believe to be nothing less than a modern day Psalms, only instead of being written by the struggling King David, who wrestled with God, it was written by a struggling monk who was also wrestling with God. Thomas Merton’s, Dialogues With Silence is a sensational compilation of his thoughts and prayers and some drawings he did while in a monastery in silence.
I don’t know why I chose, now, to add this book to my miniature library that I accumulated while packing for this trip (which includes David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within you, and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.- which by the way is chosen simply because I faked my way through it in High school and have always wanted to read it; not because I am a depressed lunatic that carries it around everywhere). So, when my journal opened up inadvertently to a page that read, “Dialogues With Silence, Pg 75 – Why is it so dark?” I found it, let’s say, fortuitous that I had brought this book with me. At what is now 4:45 in the morning, I relinquish the idea that I was fortunate to have this book in my bag, because were it not for this book’s presence, I would not have been asking myself this question that pulled at my closed eyelids as I was sleeping. I would have read the journal entry and passed it on by.
So rather than fortune, curse found me; A beautiful curse, though. A curse that only at 2:30 in the morning could I finally conceive its purpose. Only in the darkness can I comprehend its grand meaning: If I am floating on the breeze, then God guided that breeze to this book. He guided me to this book which led me to the question of the day – maybe the question not just of this day, but of this journey I am on. A question that God asks me, but I do not know how to answer nor do I know how to comprehend it. A question that woke me, and a question that now, as the first birds begin singing in the morning, I am beginning to comprehend, but still cannot answer. Could this be the question? If I am right about the breeze and it led me to this book and this page, maybe the breeze too led me to a conversation with my pastor years ago. And in one of Rich’s profound moments (which he has a lot of by the way) he actually helped me initiate a shotgun start for this journey I am now on. A journey within a journey – because life itself has always been, is, and will be a journey.
While I wrestled with God, questioning why He, The Ocean, destroyed my sand castles, my plans, and while I reflected on childhood, and while I dreamed of the special power to fly again, and while I packed my backpack for this trip and while I said goodbye to my friends as if it were the last time I’d see them, still not understanding why it felt like that, I was becoming one with the breeze. I was preparing to go with the wind. I was summoning up the courage to ask God one more time, with expectation for disappointment and frustration, “What is your plan for me?”
As Christians say, God is good… at the question game. God is the king of improve. He’s the Improv god (sorry Daniel, I used to think you were the improv god). I like playing improve games too. I love the question game – a storyline played out only using questions for conversation. But I can’t stand when people I play against find the easiest ways out. Here’s an example of someone I don’t like playing the game with (person B):
Person A: What are you doing to night?”
Person B: Don’t you know?
or
Person A: Are you going to the show tonight?
Person B: Are you?
See, there is a way to play the game where person B can actually in part answer the question with a question, thus creating conversation:
Person A: What are you doing tonight?
Person B: Didn’t I tell you I’m going to the show?
Person A: Which show was that?
Person B: Have you heard of Wicked?
Person A: Is that the show about the Witch in Wizard of Oz?
Person B: Oh, did you see them talking about it on Jay Leno last night?
On and on. Yeah, God is good at this game. So, when I ask, “God, what is your plan for me?” his answer is, “What do you want it to be?”
And the game has begun.
Buy: Beautiful Boy, Dialogues With Silence, The Kingdom of God is Within You
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