Crayola Crayons

I once read an article in a church magazine about a girl getting ready to start kindergarten. As part of the process, she and her mother met with the teacher and she had some evaluative tests. For one of the tests, the teacher asked her to pick her favorite color from the crayon box and write her name. The little girl sat there for quite some time unable to do it. The teacher moved on to something else. The mother was confused, knowing that her daughter knew how to write her name. Later, she asked her about it. The girl said it was because her favorite color wasn't in the box.

The point of the article was that sometimes we have to take what life gives us and do our best with it. Color our world with the crayons in the box rather than waiting for the colors we really want.

This is all fine and good, but I realized over the weekend that I have been painting a really dull picture, pretty much since I graduated from college (can you believe it's been almost four years!?) I'm not being cynical; my life is good and I'm doing/ have done a lot of what I wanted to. What I mean is...

It's like I've arrived. As a kid, I imagined growing up and going to college. Growing up and being a teacher. Growing up and dating, getting married, having babies. Now that I've done some of those, what do I look forward to? And the things that haven't happened? I keep looking back wondering what did or didn't happen. What chance I missed, etc. rather than believing that it's still out there to find and do. It's like walking backwards. I'm stepping into the future, but looking at the past.

I felt I found some hope, at least for a moment, that there is still a lot of growing up to do and goals to accomplish and daydreams to have. That was very freeing. If I can at all believe in destiny, mine is still there- out there, not behind me or encrypted in a secret message I must have misplaced in my life. Destiny is not something you finish or accomplish; it's something that you live and constantly do.

Right?