Not How I Pictured It

I was sharing with a friend my surprise and dismay at a certain unhappy turn of events in my life. “I didn’t know it would be like this,” I told her.

“Have you ever seen ‘Lost in Yonkers’?” she asked. “There is a priceless line in the movie that describes what you are going through.” Since I was unfamiliar with Neil Simon’s play or the movie made from it, she gave me a briefing. The story begins with two young brothers sent to live with their domineering grandmother after their mother’s death, but it soon revolves more around their Aunt Bella. She is a sweet, unsophisticated woman of thirty-five, who will always think like a child but, as she explains, “feel like a woman inside of me.” An avid movie-goer, she yearns to find someone who will return her love. And so she found Johnny, also limited mentally and emotionally, who is an usher at the theater

One scene depicts a family meeting, nervously convened by Bella, to announce her plan to marry Johnny, open a restaurant with him, and have her own babies. As she herds mother, sister, and nephews into the places she has “assigned” them, her brother Louie is a holdout. He wants to stand—actually, what he really wants to do is to leave. Bella tells him, “But it would be much better if you were sitting, Louie. I pictured everybody sitting.” And later, when Louie raises objections during “the family talk” that Bella is conducting, she cries out in exasperation, “That’s not how I pictured it.”

Isn’t that like life? So often we imagine just exactly how circumstances are going to play out, and almost inevitably we are mistaken! Sometimes we are surprised and pleased, because things work out even better than we anticipated. But sometimes we are surprised and dismayed—or even deeply hurt or angry or embarrassed. The result we expected failed to materialize.

It’s easy to welcome the happy ending, not so easy to accept the disappointing one. However, neither outcome can cause us to lose our balance if we are secure in our knowledge that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28) We’ll be happier if we can give up our attempts to engineer every single aspect of life, and can recognize that the outcome is not entirely dependent upon our cleverness, our sincerity, or our own hard work. We simply cannot control everything. What a relief to know that God is in control! And although not every experience is by itself a good one, yet in all of them together, God is working for our good.

MaryMartha
(All rights reserved)

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright©1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Email: mrymrtha@gmail.com