Stumble

We’d like to take comfort in the idea that perhaps we saw it all coming. There is often a vague recollection of an ominous portent, or a sense that a feeling about a hunch you had about an instinct may have been uncannily prescient. It is usually a fiction of course, as we grope about in the dark, stumbling upon the next question or calamity wrought by, as always, our fallen nature and the burden of free will. But stumble blindly we do, and I thank God for it; truly. 

If we were ever to fathom the crosses and the graces that lay before us in a single instant, we’d have been crippled by one, or the other. Terrified and unwilling to drink from the cup set before us, or crushed by the humility that should inevitably stem from the wonders of God’s gratuitous love and grace. 

But let me assure you (he asserts, poking an unnerving finger into your chest as he does so), I saw it all coming, and I’ve never been the same man since, or after, or before that, really. 

If only somebody could have warned me.