7/14/2011

Life is a Circle

There is no green like the green on a tropical island.
Arianne's view from her hotel window
The port in American Samoa is brimming with ships.
Arianne's first sunrise in Samoa.
One of the interesting things about life is that if you live long enough everything seems to come full circle . . . all the seemingly random things that happen to us seem to foreshadow events in the future that we can not yet see or imagine.  But I have lived long enough to know that nothing happens outside God's grand design. 

As a college student I felt drawn to the Middle East and spent all my savings to go on a archaeological dig in Beersheba in the Negev Desert in Israel.  Years later my daughter Aubrey would become an archaeologist and work in the Middle East. 

When he was nineteen years old my husband Ross spent two years in Samoa as a Mormon missionary.  Just this week my daughter Arianne arrived in Samoa with her husband and four young children.  They will be there for four months while her husband is the engineer on a massive land slide rebuilding operation.

If there are no random events, if even one sparrow's fall does not escape God's notice - perhaps we might learn to see all the events in our lives as generous gifts from a loving Father in Heaven who knows best how to tutor and love us.