Dearest & Nearest,
Your plan for your life may have nothing to do with God’s plan. God’s plan is what happens. Your plan is what you think will happen. This does not mean that you should not make plans. Life must be lived; plans must be made.
You might plant an apple tree with a vision of mouth-watering red apples in your mind. Just when the apples are about ready to eat, you get a new job in a new country. You never eat those apples, but you eat new fruit in a new country and someone else enjoys the apples you left behind. Or maybe a storm destroys your tree and all of your apples. You cannot eat those apples, but you still benefit from having planted and loved a tree, and so does the earth!
An old Chippewa Indian axiom advises, “If your eyes cry because of losing the sun, your tears will not allow you to see the stars.”
It can feel so sad to lose something or someone you cherish. No one can say that sadness is not real for you. Emotions are part of being human. To push away or deny feelings is to be less than alive. Feelings must be acknowledged if they are to be resolved and dissolved into love—not hidden away to become clouds that obscure the light from shining through. When we are free to experience a feeling completely, we are also free to move on from that experience. Emotions can be either a flowing river, cleansing and freeing, or a dam that stops the flow.
If you cannot linger to taste even one apple from the tree you have planted, feel your longing; cry your tears—but please do not take old tears with you to the new country to which you are traveling. Neither hold a grudge at the storm for destroying your tree. The angels might change that old Chippewa saying to, “If your eyes cry too long because of losing the sun, your tears will not allow you to see the stars,”—and add another, “If your eyes never cry, your unshed tears may become clouds that obscure the light of God from shining clearly through you.”
Maybe you thought you were planting the tree to eat apples. Maybe God put the vision in your mind, not to eat apples, but as part of a greater plan. Maybe it was as simple as planting and loving a tree for a while, reaping the benefits of sun and exercise, filling your mind with the beauty of nature, giving back to the earth, and leaving a lovely legacy.
