Seeing into the Future
Sandy Dickson
She sighed as she looked at the recent photo taken of herself. How and when had she gotten so old? She certainly didn’t look like the photo in her mind’s eye, which seemed to conveniently supply her present with a much younger version.
I must have been having a bad day when this picture was taken, she thought. It was just a down day. She walked to the mirror in her bedroom. Yep, those were extra lines all right.
Her husband walked into the room and broke her train of thought. He now had a little ring of short salt and pepper hair surrounding his pink dome. She turned her head slightly to gaze at their wedding picture. There he was with a wide smile, sporting his full head of dark brown hair; one that drew comments from hair admirers and offered no threat of turning gray, let alone, turning loose.
“The hospital called. Dad isn’t doing too well,” he announced. “They don’t think we will have him much longer.”
“Oh, Honey, I’m so sorry,” she said in an attempt to offer comfort, but thinking, we saw this coming, but it’s always difficult.
He came over to her and took her hand. “What are you thinking? You seem to be entranced,” he commented.
How he knew her after 35 years of marriage, she thought. “I was just thinking about how we can’t really glimpse too far into the future. We can only speculate, but things can turn out much differently than what we have imagined.”
“Are you talking about my dad?” he asked.
“Partly. But really, just everything. Like that we didn’t have any idea your father would get leukemia. And remember how, when we were much younger, we dreamed of what we would do in life and then we went for it? Some things turned out, some didn’t. Look at the Bittners. They had no idea on that joyous day they had their first child that they would lose him to a traffic accident as a teen. Nor did they have any idea their daughter would become Miss
“Lives are comprised of all kinds of things and moments, both happy and sad, and we all have our time in both barrels,” he continued. “Even if we think we can foresee some things, they don’t always turn out that way or the way we hope. There are no guarantees. Their son gave them added joy for the time he was here and maybe that was his only purpose.”
“I wish we could see into the future more, so that we could brace ourselves,” she said.
“Don’t you think that would be worse?” he said. “God obviously doesn’t want it that way. Some things that are inevitable, He let’s us see, like Dad’s situation, and we are bracing. But there are things that happen that we wouldn’t want to know ahead of time. It would scare us and we might not want to go forward. But when they happen, we’re so busy doing what we have to do to get through them, we don’t have time to fret about them. After we get through them, we can sigh and wonder how we did it, but we can see too, how we stretched and grew from them or how we had to accept them for lack of choice and yet, found a way to move on. With God’s way, we have to, no matter what. Otherwise, we might never leave our homes. Then we’d miss out on everything; on life itself, good and bad if we knew ahead what is to happen in our future. God’s way is always best.”
She sneaked a quick glance again at both of them in their glory and beauty on their wedding day before her eyes drifted across the room to the mirror that reflected her present image. She thought about his words, ‘how we had to accept things for lack of choice.’
“Yeah, I think you’re right.” It’s better we don’t know ahead of time,” she admitted as her looking glass exposed her knowing smile.