What's Waiting Up Ahead?

“It would be so much easier if I knew now that I’d be published later,” said my writer friend and first-time mom-to-be.

As our conversation continued past writing on to parenting, I came back to this thought. “If I’d have known in those early, horrible years that I’d have an awesome almost twenty-year-old, it would have been so much easier.”

And yet in neither case are we allowed to know the end at the beginning. Why? Because the Lord calls us to a life of faith, of trusting in Him for the future—of our work and our children—while we simply obey day by day. We run the race with the finish line veiled in secrecy. And really, would we want it any other way? If we knew difficult things were coming, we’d shrink back from facing them. If we knew good things were coming, we wouldn’t have to push through and learn the hard lessons of suffering and dependence on God in the moment.

And so we put one foot in front of the other, every moment of every day, trusting in the goodness of God and persevering in our pursuit of godliness. And when we cross that finish line, our circumstances won’t matter. It will be our character, forged during the race of life, which wins the prize.