The Threads I Could Not See

I have been thinking this week about how I ended up here, teaching, after about twenty years of writing and acting. If you had described my current life to me a decade ago, I am not sure I would have believed you, and I certainly did not plan it. And yet, standing in a classroom now, I can feel how much of that earlier work prepared me for this without my knowing it was preparation.

Paul writes to the Romans that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, for those called according to his purpose. I used to hear that verse as a promise that everything would turn out pleasant, which is not what it says and not how life has gone. What I think it actually means is closer to this: that nothing is wasted. The detours, the years that felt like they were leading nowhere, the skills I thought belonged to one life and turned out to belong to another. None of it was lost.

I cannot prove this to anyone. It is not an argument. It is something I have come to trust by looking backward over my own life and seeing a coherence I could not see while it was happening. The threads I could not make sense of at the time turn out to have been going somewhere. That gives me a particular kind of patience now with the threads I still cannot make sense of.