Changes in Life

Have you ever considered why God put you where you are today?  Why were you not born during the Civil War or the Great Depression?  Why were you put in this town, in your family at this time?

I was thinking about this today as I contemplated the changes in life that come to all of us.  The things we are going through in life today would not have happened exactly as they have had we been born at a different time or to different parents.

My mother and daddy had been married fourteen years when I was born.  Mother was the oldest of six. Her mother worked and Mother looked after her siblings.  She use to tell me she remembered well when she was eight standing on a little stool at the old wood stove stirring gravy while holding a crying sibling on her hip with another one pulling on her dress and crying. She felt she had already raised a family when she married my daddy. They had been married two years when Black Tuesday happened and the stock market collapsed and the Great Depression came.  Those years were certainly not years to bring children in the world, to their thinking. So, it was that I was not a child of the Great Depression but a child of the Forties.

Because I was born when I was and where I was, I married my husband when I did.  Our children were born when they were and they married their mates and had their children.  When you stop to consider the ramifications of your birth, the location in which you live, the people you come in contact with, there are all kinds of changes that could have happened in your life.
Your life and mine were all planned out by our Heavenly Father before we
were even born.

“Before I shaped you in the womb,
    I knew all about you.
Before you saw the light of day,
    I had holy plans for you” Jeremiah 1:5A The Message

I think about those who are graduating from high school and college.  Most of them have already made plans for the next step in their lives.  They have chosen which college they will attend or which job they will apply for if they have just finished high school. If college is behind them, they are looking for employment in their field; they have plans to travel and see the world or they have found their soul mate and will be marrying soon.  All of these things would not be occurring now had God not planned for the lives of each one at the beginning of time.  That’s a pretty sobering thought, isn’t it?

“World events are under his control. He removes kings and sets others on their thrones. He gives wise men their wisdom and scholars their intelligence.” Daniel 2:21 TLB

“There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
    a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
    a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.” Ecclesiastes 3:1-8