May I Speak to the Manager, Please?

Have you ever wanted to stop in the middle of your life and say, "May I speak to the manager, please?" Do things always turn out the way you planned, or do you feel like your life is more out of than under control?  Midlife is one of the most common times in our lives when the delusion that our lives will actually unfold as we have planned for them to quickly evaporates.  And it is this very sense of a loss of control that is one of midlife's most powerful and difficult experiences.  Not only have our lives not worked out according to our plans, but we now are often dealing with inescapable and potentially life-altering things that we also have little to no control over.  Here's to each of us who is going or has gone through this.

Think about how little of our lives that we actually control.  We did not choose where we would be born, yet the location of our births has shaped the entire stories of our lives.  I can't help but think of this every time I travel overseas [now I realize that I tend to go to places that are way off the beaten path and that there are no Fodor's travel guides for ... i.e. medical mission trips to third world locations ... though excitedly that is about to change for the better ... I can't really discuss that here, however, as it is supposed to be a surprise; though sadly, my bride is an incredibly hard person to surprise ... yet another thing that isn't going as planned:)]. What would our lives have been like had we been born in the filth of a New Delhi ghetto, a mud-brick and straw roof hut in Cameroon or Uganda, a communist housing project in the old Soviet Union or in war-torn Afghanistan?  We did not choose the families that we were born into, but could there have been any decision more important to what we grew into?  We did not choose what period of history that we were born into, yet it has shaped everything that we have ever experienced.  Imagine what our lives would have been like had we been born into a peasant family in medieval Europe or into the family of an ancient Chinese craftsman.  What if we'd been born into slavery in Pharaoh's Egypt?  Or born on a wagon train heading west during the California gold rush?

No, we did not choose the world events that would take place around us, but there is no denying how much they have shaped our lives.  It is difficult on this side of 9/11 not to think about that group of middle-eastern men that plotted for months to hijack those planes and to fly them into buildings every time we board an airline jet.  My guess is that none of us knew any of those men and none of us were personally the targets of their attack, yet our sense of the world, our personal securities and our habits of travel have been shaped by what they did.

We do not control the progress of science and knowledge [except perhaps to a small degree for some of us], but there is no denying just how much our lives have been shaped by a myriad of discoveries that we had nothing to do with.  We all live longer because of antibiotics, statins, blood pressure medications, public health measures such as clean water and functioning sewers, food inspection, vaccinations, modern imaging studies such as x-rays, mammography, computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging.  We live much more safely and with great liberty because of the rise of democracy, free elections and democratic government.  We are able to accomplish incredibly more because of electricity, the internal combustion engine [at least until President Obama and Al Gore rid the world of them], telecommunication technology, the microprocessor and even modern plumbing.

We all should be incredibly humbled by the vast array of inventions and technologies that so greatly impact our lives over which we exercised no decision beyond choosing Ford, Chevy or Honda or Apple or PC.  My life is a perfect example.  I did not choose to be born in Amarillo, Texas to professing Christian parents.  I did not plan to grow up in the Methodist church or attend Vacation Bible School or attend confirmation class when I was twelve.  I did not plan to have a sister or even a step-brother and a step-sister.  I did not plan for my parents to divorce and re-marry or for my mother to be bipolar and commit suicide.  I did not choose my personal giftings [I would likely have chosen quite differently].  I did not plan what my home life would be like while growing up and what blessings and struggles I would encounter there.

I never planned to become a physician ... in fact, all my high school aptitude tests said that career was what I was least suited for.  I initially planned to become a chemical engineer, like my father, at least until I got to college and discovered that I actually did not like chemistry at all [despite enjoying it for two years in high school].  As a sophomore in college I changed my major to architectural engineering ... a field I still think I would have really enjoyed.  However, three weeks prior to my junior year in college, God changed by my career path as well as the college I had chosen to attend [now that is an entire story unto itself].

I did not plan to ever marry or even date Janna my wife.  The two girls I had been sitting next to during the first five weeks of Biology 101 were late to class and as I was looking back for them I "just so happened" to see Janna sitting 5-6 rows behind me, and since I recognized her from my lab I went back to sit by her.  It "just so happened" that the new professor for the second five weeks passed out a seating chart that day ... and we were "stuck" by each other for the next five weeks.  Basically, we've never left each others' sides since.

I never planned to live or practice medicine in Tallahassee, Florida or Florida at all really.  For my entire adolescence and early college years, the plan was to move up into the Colorado Rockies once I had completed my college degree.  It is an amazing and humbling thing to admit all of these things because almost none of what has happened in my life has been according to my plan.  There was no way that I could have ever anticipated all of the necessary events, locations, people, conversations, problems and even world events that had to come together for either my plan or His plan to work.  And to even stop to consider all of the things that had to come together for any one piece of our stories to unfold the way it did, it would truly overheat our brains.

I am now in my early fifties.  I do live in Tallahassee, a city that I love and call my own, but also a city that was never on my map of potential life destinations.  I am married to Janna.  She is a charming, pretty and gracious woman, full of life, bursting with giftings and in love with the Lord.  Had I shopped and planned for decades, I would not have been smart enough to say, "This is the granddaughter of two pastors and a child with an amazingly Godly heritage and legacy who grew up in Crawfordville, Florida [really?!?] and I need to find her because she is my ultimate life partner."  Yet, in the last 31-1/2 years, no one has been a dearer friend or had a more profound effect on my life than she.  I am a part of a profession that I dearly love, one that I feel very privileged to be a part of nearly every day, one that has provided a material lifestyle of living far beyond what I ever expected to earn or live, one that makes excellent use of my giftings, yet one that I would have never chosen for myself had it been the last career left on earth.  Truth be told, I couldn't even dissect a frog in high school ... and had a very difficult time doing so in college; yet on the first day of medical school, I was chosen to be the captain of my cadaver team of four in Gross Anatomy class with the honor of making the first incision ... and yes, there is a reason the class is called "Gross Anatomy."

After 25 years of parenting, I look at the lives of my four children, each unique, and am amazed at how their lives have unfolded and, at the same time, are unfolding.  As much as Janna and I have tried to guide them, we could never have planned their lives for them.  One of the most dangerous delusions for all of us is the delusion of our own sovereignty.  And one of our most dangerous idols is the idol of control.  If we spend our days trying to establish our sovereignty and our control, then we have not yet learned to rest in the Lord's control.  In this way, midlife is an incredibly important time for us spiritually because it tends to explode all the myths of our personal sovereignty and control.  The malaise of discouragement that follows is not so much an introduction to a world out of control, but rather, a God-sent reordering of control that can put us in better places spiritually than we have ever before known.  At those precise moments when we finally face the fact that we are not in charge, and in reality, have never been, we are finally ready to know and experience what it means to rest in the control of another.  Yes, Someone is in charge.  Every detail of every minute of our lives has been ordered by Him.  The problem is that in midlife our plans and His plans tend to collide.  And it is in the carnage of that midlife intersection that so many people tend to lose their way.