Life without an eraser

Have you ever messed up and then wished there were some way to make the mistake go away. You

just can’t, can you. Some wise person once said, “Life is like drawing without an eraser,” once the line is down, there is nothing you can do to make it go away. It’s like drawing with a permanent marker. You can paint over it to cover it up, but often it bleeds through the paint to be seen by all.

At times life can be difficult or perhaps challenging to say the least. Lately I have often repeated the old saying, “We live in interesting times,” referring to all of the changes our country is going through. How do we deal with “interesting times,” or challenging times? I like the saying I read recently that said, “sometimes the most difficult lesson in life to learn is: Which branch to climb and which one to break off.” That is tough isn’t it? That’s life without an eraser.

What happens to our lives, how do they change so drastically or go in a direction we had not planned? Not everyone starts out in the best household, the best home situation, but some do and something happens and their lives are turned upside down. Mary LoVerde wrote a book that addresses this titled, “I used to have a handle on life, but it broke.” I’ve had that handle break a few times myself, so I can relate to this, and maybe you have too, so how do we deal with this?

First of all we can’t plan long range and expect it to always go smoothly or the way we had envisioned.

James reminds us in James 4:13-14, “Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit,” yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”

Let me say though that this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t plan for the future. A life without visions for our future, without plans is no life at all. I honestly believe that God expects us to think or plan, there is just too much in the scripture about thinking about our future, about how we can serve God, about our eternal future to miss this point. However anyone who thinks it is going to be smooth sailing or that our plans will always come into fruition doesn’t have a true grip on reality.

Well, what should we do then? Well, James adds another verse to the thought above that is important to our plans. He adds in James 4:15, “Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

So, when we are planning, we are praying! We need to factor into our plans God and his will. We plan and say, “This is what I intend to do if it is God’s will”. In my life I generally practice the “open door plan”. I try something, stretch towards some plan and if it works out and God opens that door, great, if not, if the door stays shut, that’s great too. You see; then you just change directions and try something else. You see the truth is that we can live our life with out an eraser, because we don’t have to stay between any man made lines. The only lines that are important are the ones that God tells us to stay in side of in his Book. So, how are you doing?