Traveling with my family when I was younger was so much easier then. My parents took care of bookings, itineraries, passports, visas, getting the car checked out for a road trip. Everything. All my sisters and I had to do was pack and hop into the car. Combining my dad's meticulous planning and my mom's resolve to keep her family from starving in transit, our trips usually go forth without a hitch. These make for great bonding memories stored safely in our family albums (when we entered the age of digital, dusty albums became dusty CDs).Now I am far from organizing a big trip all by myself, but I realize that I've been organizing my comings and goings for quite a few years now. During university, medical school and internship, I lived away from home, allowing me both the privilege and the bane of planning my hours. Because I only lived a few meters away from my college classroom or the anatomy laboratory, I was assured of not wasting time stewing in traffic or wasting precious brain cells planning my route. Likewise, I didn't have to bring everything because I could always come back for them, if need be. The first two periods of my quasi-independence were easy enough because I did not have the added responsibility of bringing a car. Like a kid, all I had to do was hop into my friends' vehicle and we were off on another metropolitan adventure. My biggest contribution was to keep my eyes peeled for a parking space in cramped car lots (which is usually the case in the busy northern side of the city, where we hung out a lot).
Nowadays, today in particular, I am adjusting (but liking) to juggling the different roles that my parents played during our trips: shopping for food, putting gas in the car, renewing my driver's license, packing my bag for the week and all the other things I took for granted when I was younger. Today, I am responsible for making sure that the routine for my trips is like a well-oiled machine, running smoothly, without a hitch. I hadn't realized that I've been doing this for the past years. While this divulgence isn't exactly profound, it does make me glad to know that God has prepared me for these mundane tasks by providing me with an example (my parents), leading up to the provision (my friends and their vehicles, for example), building up to the crest of the wave of responsibility that would otherwise overwhelm me.
Seeing past the everyday errands that threaten to bring monotony to our routine, I see how God daily holds my hand and my heart as He plants the visions of what He planned out for me way before I was born (Psalm 139:16). Like the way my parents planned a smooth trip for me and my sisters, like the way my friends brought the provision of transportation for another memorable escapade, so God plans and provides for the seasons, the comings and goings, of my life and makes sure that, if I ever do get a flat tire or my flight gets delayed, I am surrounded by His goodness and lovingkindness (Psalm 23:6) that will give me the strength and the joy to change the flat or wait patiently at the departure gate for the great things that are surely coming.
God wants to do the same for you. Trust in Him. Know that His promises are true. He has created plans and purposes for our lives that we cannot truly understand without being prepared for them. In His perfect time, He reveals it to us, part by part, all the more allowing our hearts to see His glory and making this gift all the more precious, all the more worth caring for. All these, the Bible says, are far beyond what we were expecting and visualizing for our lives (Eph. 3:20). Why set a limit to our comings and goings? Join your heart and your life-walk to the Saviour who wants to love on us and show us the beauty of soaring past what we have set for ourselves.
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