I played soccer in my youth.
Considering that I REALLY needed glasses during almost the entire time, I was pretty good. I have, in fact, wondered if I could have done more with soccer as a player if I had discovered my vision drawbacks earlier.
But I try to only go down that road a little bit because it is too easy in such musing to assume that everything else would have been the same, except that I could see clearly, so, of course I would have been a better player, maybe good enough to do more with soccer than the few years I played.
In reality, glasses may or MAY NOT have improved me as a player, and would have changed countless other things that I would have had to deal with.
God was quite aware of my vision drawbacks and was not interested in them. He was interested in a relationship, a friendship, a mutual understanding (as mutual as it can be with GOD). Could I, as a 20 year old aspirant to the American dream see that God loves us not by giving earthly happiness (though oddly enough he does that at times) ?
And now at age 42, God is presenting the same question: can you Arnie, get though the broken dreams of what you think your life could have been and see that the life you have is exactly the life that can best show you who God is?
These are the complex thoughts feelings and thoughts that I had as I watched the US tie Italy in World Cup group play here in 2006 Germany. A soccer match became much more, for me. Not because it really was much more, but because God wanted it to be more for me today.
Either all things (here, semi-blindness in the past) work together for good in my life, or they don't. And though it may take a lifetime to see how and why, they do work together to good.
