Second Thoughts

Isn’t it funny how our viewpoints change. I have just been reading over some notes from a few days ago and what appeared to be a moment of intense importance to me only a few hours before now seems flat and impersonal. In the intervening moments I have lost the sense of inspiration I had in the moment and now I can’t seem to regrasp it. And yet, somethings do hold true through time – like the recurring sense of God’s love.

I was talking with my wonderful wife the other night and while we were talking words emerged from my lips, words that were tussling with a sense of value and purpose and truth and expectation. If God, my loving Father, knit me together in my mother’s womb, if He looked at me before I was born and determined that I would be the person I am today, just what does that mean for me now, as I sit in England in 2026. Who is this ‘me’ really and how does my Father see me? And, whenever I ask myself this question I keep coming back to the astounding reality, the deep rooted sense that, in some ways, it doesn’t really matter because my Father loves me with an unquenchable love anyway and, in another way, matters more than anything because I am the only ‘me’ ever to have lived and if I don’t do ‘me’ to the best of my ability, nobody will.

Yes, I have my quirks, we all do, and some people won’t get them but that doesn’t make me any less ‘me’. And if the ‘me’ I am is the ‘me’ God thought of before I was even the smallest cluster of cells, then that must mean something, because, as I’ve fidgeted about with before, God doesn’t make mistakes. And, if God doesn’t make mistakes, the ‘me’ He thought of before I was thought of can never be a mistake, which, in turn, means the fundamentals of who I am can’t be a mistake either. Sure, I can quite readily make mistakes. I can get the wrong end of the stick and even wilfully chose to not be the ‘me’ that God made me to be, but the ‘me’ He made me to be is still there somewhere. So, to reiterate, my job in life must be to partner with my Father in doing the best at living the ‘me’ He intended me to be, quirks and all.

I heard a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde the other day (lots of quotes are attributed to Oscar Wilde – this one may or may not really have been one of his, but even if it wasn’t, it’s such a simple concept that I’m sure loads of other people would have said it even if he didn’t). ‘Be yourself,’ he apparently said, ‘everyone else is taken.’ Whether he really did say that, or not, there’s a deep and simple truth in its sentiment, one that I can’t deny and one that dovetails perfectly with the concept I’d already been wrestling with.

So, what does it all mean? Well, for me at least, it means a new determination, a new exercise of my free will, a new engagement to keep exploring, with my Father, who He is and who He made me to be, so that I can be the ‘me’ He made me to be to the best of my ability. And, you know what?, I’m sure there’ll be some stumbles and trips along the way but, at the end of the day, no one else is going to be able to do it, so I’ll have to be the one to take it on… no second thoughts.