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Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

There has been one underlying thought running through my head this week, and in the interest of attempting to make a complete thought out of it I will probably be a little more brief than usual this week. There are an awful lot of people who look at life as their own playground, choosing the path they feel will get them to the finish line far ahead of everyone else. If I may be so bold as to think that at this stage in my life I have learned any great and valuable lesson that I now share with you, that lesson is that our entire lives are made up of a never ending series of “what if” moments.

Not all of those “what if” moments are life shattering events. In fact, most of them take place with little to no thought behind them. Take for instance “What if I stayed in bed instead of getting up and going to work?”. Certainly this is a simple question many of us face every single day, but we don’t think about the answer. We simply crawl out of bed, throw on clothes and scarf down a doughnut while praying the cup of coffee we are trying to consume will wake us up enough to function properly. You go to work because it’s what you do.

There are many other “what if” moments though that can change the course of your life. “What if I had taken someone else to my senior prom?”, “What if I had seen a doctor?”, “What if I hadn’t answered that phone when I did?” All of these tend to be questions that in an instant can determine the path you follow from that moment forward. While I do believe wholeheartedly that God has a plan for all of us and it is indeed best to let him determine the plan and its timeline, I wonder if sometimes he has more than one way for us to reach the point he has laid out for us? Could it be that every “what if” is really a way for us to choose which path we take that gets us to the end? Maybe one choice gets you there sooner than another, and maybe a series of choices get you the desired result but sometimes it tends to be more like driving down a winding gravel road than taking the freeway there.

Whatever “what ifs” that are rolling around inside of you, know that God hasn’t abandon his plan for you, but rather he is still working behind the scenes to bring you to the place and point HE wants for you. Those “what if” moments are something we shouldn’t dwell on too much, because when we look at what has happened on the other side of those decisions, you just might find that the path you’ve taken has ended up being a heck of a lot better than the “what if” path, and I can promise you that you will see the finish line eventually if you just have a little faith. See you next week…remember, we’re all in this together.