The Road Not Traveled

Do you ever wonder, "What if?"  Our lives are a series of decisions, and some seemingly small ones make such a big difference.  Sometimes the decisions others make have a huge affect on our lives as well.

I probably spend more time than I should thinking about those branches of my path and life that might have been, and wondering what they may have been like.

• What if I had stayed with my boyfriend from home instead of breaking up with him for Darrell?  Would I have spent years as a military wife and would that have appeased my sense of adventure with many moves that way?
• What if Darrell's oncology team had gone with the original plan to give him the chemotherapy combination with a 99% infertility rate?  Would we have spent years trying to get conceive with no success?
• What if we had decided to try for each of our kids at just slightly different times?  I can't imagine not having the two amazing kids I've given my heart to and would lay down my life for at any time.

I could seriously go on like this for ages.  I even made a chart to highlight several of the big decisions and milestones just for the first 10 years of my adult life (from age 18-28):

 

The dotted lines lead to completely different and unknown paths.  And these are just the big events that stand out for me personally.  I have no idea all the ways my life touched others, or even the ways that perhaps I should have helped or touched others and didn't.

God gave us free will, but I also believe that he has a plan for each of us.  That's one of the tougher aspects of Christianity to completely grasp, in my opinion.  Does God help connect the dotted lines back to our planned path when we make the "wrong" decision?  I'm not sure, but I do know that sometimes he has redeemed the decisions in my life that I either should not have made, or that seemed to take me astray at the time.

I worked one job I disliked, in part because for most of the time I commuted an hour and a half each way while pregnant, but we found a way for me to stay home with our daughter for a while, and I'll forever treasure that time as a new mom with her (even though some days were more difficult than anything I've done before or since).  I worked another job I disliked for three years.  Then I started a small business that ultimately failed.  Then Darrell's job kept going downhill, and the only way to fix it all seemed to be moving away from the only place that had truly become home to both of us.  But every step of the way, things fell right into place.  God seemed to be telling us all along that this move was his plan, even if we didn't know why.  It was the first time in my life that I really felt that way, and it has been very comforting.

What about you?  What is your path, and do you ever wonder about the roads you turned away from along the way?