I was thinking about Forrest Gump during my morning walk today. He's the mentally retarded character in the movie of the same name. During his childhood, he overcame a physical condition in his spine that forced him to use the awful metal leg braces of that time to walk. Eventually he overcame his physical disabilities and lived a full life with the rest of what God gave him.
Forrest met life with absolute sincerity, honesty and truth.
One of the famous lines from the movie was when he said, "Momma always said that, 'life was like a box of chocolates. You never knew what you were gonna get." Then at the end of the movie, Forrest is putting flowers on the grave of his wife, Jenny. He is standing under the tree they used to sit in growing up. He's looking down at her grave, talking to her:
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 miss you, Jenny. If there's anything
you need, I won't be far away.
I think Forrest was right about life. I think that God DOES have a destiny already picked out for us, a path he wants us to take. But we get to choose that path and sometimes the breezes of life kinda push us off course and off the path. Kinda like the feather shown at the beginning and end of the movie. We can get blown around just that easy and never know where we'll land, because we're no longer in charge of our life.
When I titled this Blog, I wrote, "The recollections of a lucky man..." as the subhead. One Christian guy told me that it should be, "The recollections of a blessed man..." I remember that I wanted to pop that man on the head, but fortunately restrained myself and just kinda nodded at him and smiled. Who was he to tell me what to put down, and why should I change it to blessed?
Shoot fire, if God made us and the world we live in (he did) and he has a plan and a path for us to take (he does), a destiny for us to walk into, then aren't we blessed all the time? Sure we are. But the storms in our life blow this way and that, and we don't always understand the blessing of the places we accidentally land. If you look at an oyster only on the outside, you'll miss the pearl on the inside.
Now I don't really know if this means that God created a kind of beautiful randomness that we live in, in effect a mortal luck we live under, sometimes pulling the ace and sometimes the seven. Hey wait, I'm using poker talk now. Will I go to hell? Nah, but sure as patooty, some folks will be irritated by that, and they'll want to calm me down and tell me how to speak and why God is also a mean God and not just the loving heart that I know. I digress.
So if God did create all things and all people and he's already at the end and beginning of all time then even luck is controlled by him, and so there is no chance involved. Ahhhh, but for us there is. For us there is a beautiful and sometimes ugly chaos involved, and we never know what we'll pick from the chocolate box of life. Sometimes the chocolate is bitter and we want to spit it out. It makes us sick and sometimes it even kills us. The bitter chocolate can make our lives a living hell and we say, "I guess it just wasn't my day." Or even, "What bad luck!"
Because luck goes both ways, good and bad. And a lucky piece of chocolate can taste fine fine fine and light us up like a fire seen through a window of your lonely cabin when you just come over the ridge, cold and ready to rest. You stop there and realize that the end is in sight and that you made it. A good piece of chocolate from the candy box of life can fill you with happiness and sweetness, and make you hunger for more. Always more. Give me another sweet blessing.
But a blessing is only a one way street. So when I choose to call myself a LUCKY MAN, there is an implicit understanding that sometimes I'm not. Sometimes my luck runs out. But either way, lucky or unlucky, I am blessed. How is it that folks can have something great happen and say, "God has blessed me." Or I'm blessed to be here.
Does that mean that God is NOT blessing us during the rest of the time when we can't feel or see his blessing? Did God unbless you? Is it possible that he is in fact blessing us all the time, but we decide what to accept as a blessing? Yeah, I think it is.
Forrest Gump came at life with a simple purpose and a singular honesty. He knew God and loved him by loving everyone, even the mean Black Panther man and the Drill Instructor. He never changed who he was whether his luck was good or bad, whether he was blessed or......blessed a little less.
Jesus never said to come to him like Forrest Gump, instead telling us to come to him with the simplicity and honesty of little children. Just like Forrest, who never grew up to learn dishonesty and hatred. If we can learn to deal with life like Forrest Gump, a mentally retarded but pure of heart man, we might just become better people, worry less and maybe even learn to be the way God always intended us to be: a loving people
Gosh, what a lucky blessing that would be!
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