Mars Needs Moms - Really?

I am a perpetual student.

I will admit that I have a tendency to look into most (not all) situations or circumstances I am in for a lesson to be learned. I really spent too much of my life as if on a mission, focused on task, and missed the life lessons - and life - happening all around me. I can often get on people's nerves with this, but from traffic to that annoying person standing in line next to me at the store to kids movies, I am looking for a lesson to be learned.

Yesterday, I took the kids to see Mars Needs Moms. (Aside: if you have not seen it, it is a pro-family, pro-father and pro-mother, tearjerker of a movie - especially if you are a mom. Trust me, bring a kleenex). I'm not going to spoil it, I just want to make a quick point. The part of the story I want to focus on here is this: there is a particular character in the movie, Gribble, that is able to help the young boy, Milo, get to and save his mother. However, the reason Gribble is even on Mars in the first place is that years ago he tried, unsuccessfully, to save his own mother from the martians. But, as I watched the story unfold, I saw that had Gribble not gotten on the spaceship so many years ago, he would not have been there to help Milo. It would be easy to see Gribble's situation as a failure - he was unable to save his mother or return to earth so his life was wasted. Yet, had he not been there when Milo arrived, no one would have been able to help Milo.

Lesson: it is easy to look at a circumstance as a failure because things didn't go as we planned. It is easy to look back with regret or feelings of "wasted time." Yet, I refuse to believe that just because circumstances don't go the way I think they're supposed to, that I've wasted anything, especially if I came away having learned something and become a better person through it. God has laid it heavy on my heart for about a week now that even when He tells me something is His plan, it may not be for the purpose I think it's for; that doesn't make it any less His plan. I may never know how He has used me. I may never know why God placed me in the position He did at that particular moment in time - possibly to help or connect with or encourage someone in need - until I stop making every moment about me.

Some of you know that I have said goodbye to a very important relationship this week. In the spirit of transparency, I cannot pretend that it didn't happen and I cannot pretend that I do not hurt. Yet, I choose not to see any moment of our time together as wasted. I wish things had turned out differently. I wish I could have done a better job at certain things and wish we could have communicated better about things. But, in the end of it all, past anger and hurt and confusion, I choose to see the positive; the lessons learned.

God used this special person:

To make me stronger.

To bring back out the minister in me.

To encourage me to write.

To help me to see life in a grander scheme that my own tiny perspective.

To fuel a desire within me to live life like an adventure.

I am changed - I like to think for the better - and I am who I am today because God allowed me to experience this adventure. I will look back with fondness and joy over who God has been honing me to be over these months. And look with anticipation towards what lies on the horizon.

Hmmm...wonder what kind of life lessons we can learn from Kung Fu Panda...