When you watch children do things... get places.... discover, often the way they do it seems strange and alien. It doesn't make sense because we have developed our own ways of doing stuff that are simple and on the whole make life that little bit easier.
Take this morning for example, to get the the raisins held by a 2 year old's Mum involved climbing over a large inflatable bed thing.... we looked and wondered why she didn't just walk round. It doesn't make sense for us to take the difficult route, but for her, it was the most direct route and made the most sense. The inflatable bed thing was climbable, so why not climb it?
There will come a day when she won't choose the most difficult route, as through trial and error she will learn that walking round the obstacle is easier. It makes sense. To walk round the obstacle means avoiding any difficulty. She won't remember climbing over, but it will be engrained in her subconscious that it is not the best route. She will learn from what happened and then move on..... there's no 'what if I had done it differently, it would have been easier', it's more like when it comes to next time the flow of movement might be different....
Sometimes I'd love to be 2 again - where the decisions we make are immediate, and the 'what ifs' don't even come into play. When you watch a child discover you see their freedom from what has gone.... but as we grow it is easier to care about what others think, about our chosen routes being wrong, about how we might have done things differently.
When we ask 'what if?' we can't change what's happened. Yeah, we took a difficult route, we can learn from that.... We said the wrong thing, we can apologise and move on..... We did something really stupid... life still maps out in front of us and not behind us....
I spend too much time thinking about the what ifs. I am a deep thinker by nature so will evaluate and analyse every encounter I have had and every thing I say or someone else says. This is great most of the time - makes me a reflective practitioner..... but sometimes I get bogged down in the 'what ifs'. It would be so much easier if I could look at the inflatable bed thing I've climbed over and say, 'well that was really hard and actually hurt' and then work it out differently when I am in that situation again. I might learn to do it differently next time, I might have to deal with the hurt or the consequences of bad decisions, but I'm not going to get hung up on the what ifs.....
We can't change the past, we've got to work with what has happened. Whether it is someone else doing or saying something really stupid, or us doing it ourselves, we can't lie down in the what ifs and dream of a time where the paths might have been different. Past decisions, experiences and mistakes might need to be worked through to take the next step, but perhaps the question should not be 'what if it had been different?', but instead 'what can I do with this now it has happened?'.
So....my what ifs - they are God's - I give them to him to take them away... and now....I need to trust God that he will help me do what it is right with the things that have happened so I can continue along what is the best path that he lays in front of me.
Trust God from the bottom of your heart;
don’t try to figure out everything on your own.
Listen for God’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; he’s the one who will keep you on track. Proverbs 3:5-6
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