I’m not a huge movie buff, but I did enjoy the movie Sliding Doors starring Gwyneth Paltrow. It constructs the parallel “what if” concept. When a woman is fired from her job and rushes out to catch a train, two scenarios are shown. In one, she gets on the train and goes home. On the other, she misses the train and arrives home later. Each scenario follows the path of what happens next in her life. I loved the concept. The concept of what happens if you are 10 minutes early or 10 minutes late has intrigued me all my life. When I pass a car accident on the highway, I always wonder if it could have been me if I had left just a little earlier. And I remember hearing a story about a man who was late getting to the office on 9/11 because he stopped to get a doughnut. Because he was a little late, he lived when hundreds of others died. Is there such a thing as destiny?
Have you ever decided at the last minute to drive a different way home? For years you’ve driven the same highway, turned down the same streets to get home, and on this one day, on a whim, you decide to take an alternate route. Was it boredom or was something silently stirring in your gut telling you to reroute? This has happened to me before and I always wonder if by taking that alternate route, I saved myself from something happening to me or maybe allowed something to happen to someone else. We may never know the effects of our decision to turn left when we normally turn right, but I believe we must always listen to our gut instinct.
Years ago, when I went through my two-year drought without a job, I actually received a job offer during that time. It was a grant writer position – something I didn’t want to do full-time and for an organization where I didn’t really want to work. But I interviewed anyway because I had no job, no money, and if I didn’t take the job I would have to move out of my house. The person who interviewed me seemed nice enough, but I soon noticed discrepancies in what was listed about the job and in things she was telling me. She contradicted herself in the same conversation many times. My gut told me to run and never look back. But how could I do that? Although the salary wouldn’t allow me to stay in my house, it was still something. Better than the nothing that was in my bank account. I told her that I needed the weekend to think it over and would let her know my decision on Monday. And before I could even send an email thanking her for the interview, she called me, pressuring me to take the job. My family and friends thought it was very nice and showed how badly she wanted to hire me. But I thought it was a little creepy – especially when added to her behavior at the interview. Everyone I talked to advised me to take the job and after being there for a few years, said I could just begin to look for another job. But my gut was telling me something very different. Everything in me told me to turn this job down and not look back. But should I trust my gut? Maybe it was just fear of getting back out there and writing full-time (which scared me to death!).
In the end, I decided to listen to my gut and declined the job offer. People didn’t understand that decision and thought I was crazy. But as soon as I made the decision, I felt so much better – even knowing what this would mean for me financially. I couldn’t go against my gut. About one year later, I ran into someone who worked for that organization in a different department and she told me that it was a good thing I didn’t take that job. The CEO had decided to fire the woman who interviewed me and dismantled the entire department. She told me to count myself lucky that I didn’t have to go through all of the craziness during that time. So, by me not accepting the position, did it save me from going through the craziness or did it allow the craziness to happen to someone else in order to place her on another path?
I’ve thought about my decision periodically over the years and wondered what would have happened if I had accepted that position. Would I have still ended up where I am currently? There is the thought that we all have a destiny and purpose and we will eventually get there. Due to our own free will, it may take us longer or we walk a curvier path to get there, but in the end, we arrive where we are supposed to be. I’ve often wondered about that – is there a “final destination”? How will we know if/when we’ve reached our destiny? I’m not sure if the answer is so simple. What I do know is that each job I’ve had in my adult life thus far has prepared me for the next job. Even when I didn’t realize it. Early on in my career, I was Director of Youth Development. Under that umbrella was an early learning center where I provided oversight. It was one of the most difficult jobs I had. However, having that experience prepared me years later in helping my church when we were having difficult conversations about our own childcare center. And that experience prepared me for my current position as I oversee an early childcare center. At no time during my stint working in early childcare did I ever think I would do it again in my career – that was NOT the direction I was going.
I don’t know if that is destiny. For me, destiny is doing what makes you happy and following that path wherever it leads – even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else. The hard part is knowing if our destiny is really our destiny or just something we’d like to do. How many times have we heard stories of people ready to give up their dream right before the “big break” happened? So, I’ve decided to choose the path that makes me happy. Even if those paths haven’t always been or ended in the way I thought it would, there were lessons I learned that have helped me at my next destination. And it all ends up coming together. Destiny. In my younger years, no matter how much I tried to plan out my next career move, it seemed as if destiny always got in my way.
What I have come to realize is that each of us has a journey we must follow. Along that journey, we will meet people – people who will hurt us and people who will love us. We will go through circumstances that will make us cry and wish we could forget, and circumstances that will make us laugh and always cherish. But everything we face on that journey has the sole purpose for us to learn valuable lessons – about people, God, and ourselves. And we will need to learn each of those lessons in order to do the next job we are called to do. Destiny isn’t a final destination, it’s a moving target that leads you to your bliss.