When I saw the storm looming up ahead of us at midday on the Florida Turnpike, I stopped to take a picture. Sister Elizabeth and I were returning from the Cenacle in Lantana where she had given a weekend retreat to about fifty women. Although we had run in and out of rain all day, those summer rainstorms were nothing compared to the monster about to swallow us up.
It was indeed an impressive storm. As you might imagine, once in it, we could barely see the lights of the car ahead of us. At the point when it became almost impossible to tell whether or not we were on the road at all, we pulled over on the shoulder to wait it out with other prudent drivers.
Too often in daily life, it seems all we can see ahead of us is a wall of clouds. The road itself disappears. Even the usual markers become invisible. Wisely we pull off to the side to pray, to ponder, to avoid the most obvious dangers; but we can’t spend our whole lives there. Eventually we have to make decisions, take steps, move along. If we don’t, life moves us along willy-nilly.In fact, no matter how cautious we are, no matter how carefully we plan, the reality is that we never really know what the future holds.
Sometimes God graciously gives us an intuition that we are on the right path. Something happens — perhaps something small and apparently insignificant that we would miss if we weren’t paying attention — that lets us know we are where we were meant to be. It is like being on the highway, fearing we are lost, and finally seeing a sign saying, “Gainesville 25 miles.” Aha (we say to ourselves), I was on the right road all along, although I didn’t know it! And we breathe more easily.
No, we can’t see the future. What we can be confident of is that we are headed for glory, but what glory will actually look like, once we get there, again we don’t know. We do know that in moving toward glory, glory is already in our midst, and that when we arrive at our final destination, a place will have been prepared for us and — wonder of wonders — we will know that we are expected, and that we are home.
Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom, lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.(John Henry Cardinal Newman, 1833)