ONCE UPON A TIME

Fairy tale beginnings swirl in my head. I love to reinvent the pass with a happier ending and more charmed beginning. It might seem like a questionable exercise, but I find it soothing at times.

That old adage about having a chance to relive the past with your current wisdom is a saying that has haunted my own life at times. Yet, for me it is a process for seeing in the muck and quagmire of undaunted obscurity a certain clarity of hope.

I can reflect upon the migration from my deep abiding valley of regret and doubt to my current state. Not that I feel I have arrived at any point of complete maturity.

Only that I truly rejoice how God has been able to lift me from such a valley in a way that served his purpose. On the surface such a journey may not seem to have been very successful. For I an neither famous or successful by this world's standards I have nothing of which to boast in that regard.

However, within I do find a certain calm to my turbulent soul from the small doors of thought that have been opened in my life. They are gems of lucidity that God grants, which are a foretaste of the eternal.

It is like having been on a journey through a very harsh wilderness and having traveled it alone. When you finally reach a city your clothes are tattered and nothing, more that soiled rags. You look filthy and to the casual observer like some homeless vagabond.

They have no clue about the victory that warms you heart. How being in the place they take for granted, you are a survivor and that is a form of accomplish they will not understand.

So they stand in their garb of fancy dress, looking down their noses are your seemingly insignificant life. All the time totally oblivious you have just been where they will never have to go. And the one thing you have they will never have is the confidence from surviving.

In the realm of faith, this type of tale is often told and only God can add the once upon a time as it fits eternity. We are too hasty to make lateral comparison about life. To see only with our eyes and not our heart.

When we do, we miss the greater tale. All the once upon stories being written in Heaven that won't be told till the end of time as we know it.

Behind each pair of eyes there is a sunrise to a world only they can see. It is one that if God is the author has many places for leading we can always understand.

Can we greet each other in the celebration of all the once upon a times yet to come rather than the fables we call reality? That is a question only the heart can answer.