There are things that happen.. we don't always know why.
Not because we aren't smart or diligent enough, but simply because we live in a universe much larger than us.
Attributing failures or successes to ourselves or even God is not always the solution.
There are forces at work. Natural. Spiritual. Good. Evil. Broken. Whole.
We start on the edge of the river known as life. What passes by are the currents of truth, justice, love, relationship, hope and joy. In those currents are found revelations that explain, for a moment, the movement of the rapids at that point, the circular flow of eddies near a bank or the undertow in deep waters.
This river of life cannot be measured and reproduced from location to location. The nature of the flow of rivers is constantly changing and adjusting, even carving out the land.
You may be finding or feeling a sense of motion in your life. it is both refreshing and yet uncontrollable and unpredictable. While it is all those things, it is not a faithless river. It is eternal. It flows from the source, the one source of all things.
If you have felt a long season of walking through the desert, do not be discouraged. The next rise in your road is not a hill or mountain. It is the bank of a river. a river you have been walking near and drawn from all of your life. We lose sight of it for various reasons, but it does not lose us. We might feel lost, but we are never far from the stream of God. Even in our parched times, it watered us through deep wells fed by its subterranean streams.
We drink from it whenever we read the ancients texts, listen and obey the whispers of his Spirit, or help and care for the broken and lost all around us. It's central component is just this- water. The water is love. the water is not just sent from him, it is him.
The ancient texts say that he is actually life, love, light, resurrection, truth, song and salvation. These are not merely terms of philosophy. They are the contours and refreshing rains of his very essence.
Even when we don't remember these things, the river flows, supplying us with our needs and leading us to find the consummation of our deepest longings.
God himself is our food, our drink.
We can sometimes forget this. He does not.
Our human frailty does not always detect this. We are not able to retain even this profoundly important reality on all points of our journey. Like C3PO said of his companion R2D2, we have been known to make mistakes...
...from time to time...
christian life,