My mom died last year, and it is the strangest thing to not be able to pick up the phone and call her. You don’t realize how much you take for granted; I miss the sound of her voice. I am a completely different person since her passing, and I recently had an epiphany: there is a higher power and rather than stumbling across events and happiness, I am convinced God is orchestrating my life.
I used to believe in fate and coincidence, that people stumbled across happiness, but not anymore; now, I believe at my core people have a choice to make their own happiness out of their circumstances.
Looking back, I see God’s hand in my move to Columbus. I didn’t know many people when I moved here after college. I left an environment I called home, surrounded by friends I considered family, and moved to a city foreign to me. To add insult to injury, as a few short years passed, many of my friends were starting their own families. I felt like an outlier because I wasn’t ready to be engaged, married, or have kids. However, I found some BG alumni in Columbus who were in the same season of life as me. They became my lifeline. As we spent more time together, we formed strong relationships and were influential in each other’s lives. We discussed where to live, career decisions, family issues, and everything in between.
Now more than ever, I believe I was led to Columbus, to that group of friends, to my current employer, etcetera. And now, I feel like my mom and God are working together to line things up for me. Things are happening to me that I have wished for my entire life, and I believe that there is nothing I cannot achieve. For example, I have always wanted to visit Israel and be baptized in the Jordan River; I now know I will soon go.
