I was thinking about a good friend from college who played an important part of my life during the latter part of those days.  I haven’t seen or heard from him for nearly 20 years.  Why? A variety of reasons, I suspect, but that is a fact regardless of why.  Time passes and the general, the mundane, and the profound aspects of life intrude.

I decided to google him this morning just to see if anything came up, and it did.  I listened to a radio interview he did last year about his current career and creative activities.  It was so funny hearing his voice, as if no time has passed.  Yet, so much time and so many changes of life and attitude and perspective.  What can be said?  Nothing really – actually so much if given time.

Looking back over the years of friendships and relationships and acquaintances, of events and activities and and jobs and goals, I wonder from time-to-time what could have been if different decisions were made a strategic points in my life.  My life could have gone in so many different directions, and I have done so many different things.  There was no real plan.  Opportunities presented themselves and at times I fell into them and other times I pursued them.  I am a reluctant cleric.  I’ve been a bus driver, a graphic designer, a desktop publisher, a network systems director, a data analyst, a teacher, a campus pastor, a missionary, a technology geek, a oil change technician, a college instructor, a student leadership development specialist, a student three times, and coming full-circle now a missioner.

Back in Bowling Green, after my bachelors degree, I took a year of graphic design and photography in a program similiar to the primary course of the old Bauhaus.  I loved it and was quite surprised that I actually had talent.  But, just one year and I moved on to Kent.  What if I continued in design and photography, which is now my hobby.  What if I allowed my creative side to develop rather than allow myself to be taken into fields where logic ruled?  I don’t know, but here I am after all that time and all those experiences.

With people, too, how might things have been different.  What might have been if my friend and I kept in contact and maintained our friendship?  I have little contact with people from my past, and that is primarily my fault.  I am terrible at keeping up past relationships.  It isn’t that I forget about them, as is evident in my googling this past friend, but I just don’t make the phone call, write the letter or e-mail because life intrudes and the immediate cries out and I heed the call.

Sometimes, I really do wish things would have been different.  I’m in one of those times right now.  Why?  I don’t know, but I am.  It isn’t that life is bad right now, because it certainly isn’t.  I have right now the opportunity to do what I’ve always wanted to do, but the problem is knowing exactly what I always wanted to do. At times I feel like I am the proto-example of the Gen X-Y kind of guy who is just all over the place with no clear direction or intent. 

To be honest, I don’t think I would change anything of the strange and winding paths my life has taken.  I just wonder if I went back in time what might or could be different and whether I might be more settled.  God only knows, truly.