Break free of the chapters in your life and read your story

​I spent a lot of time this week reflecting on challenging incidents in my life. I spent an equal amount of time reflecting on ways I wish those incidents had gone differently, on ways I wish incidents in my life were currently going differently.

I'm reminded this morning how unhealthy it can be to think about those incidents and preferences in isolation, how when we read those moments as the whole book and not chapters in the book, we tell ourselves incomplete stories.

The incidents in our lives leave footprints. They leave them in our hearts and minds and souls. When we look at those individual footprints, when we focus on those moments in time, we can get stuck there.

Stuck staring at one single moment; one single step. Often one we consider a MIS-step.

When we look at our lives through a wider lens, when we step back and look at all of the footprints and not just one, we see where the footprints took us; we see a path.

We see the whole book and not a single chapter.

We see a greater purpose.

As I shared the footprints and paths of my life this week, people around me started seeing their own footprints and paths a little clearer. They started putting the chapters of their lives together and gained clarity about their story.

Maybe that's the power and beauty of seeing the footprints in our lives within the paths of our lives. Maybe it helps us free people from the incidents in their lives and launch them into their stories.

Into their purpose.

Maybe it helps me and them understand, that no matter what preferences we have for our past or for our present or for our future, in the end, no matter what life does with our preferences, our moments become footprints.

The moments we desire and the moments we don't; they all become footprints.

The gift is knowing that the footprint is not the story, it's a chapter. And every once in a while, we owe it to ourselves to break free of the chapters and read the story.

The whole story.