The day is at its end. The children sleep, and I’m curled up in the dark with the 
dying embers of a crackling fire as my only light. An old, familiar ache wells up in my chest and I find it hard to breathe. Where did time go? Wasn’t it “just the other day” I held hope and promise in my hands? I guess not, because many decades have passed. Time seems, at once, to race and stand still and I don’t know which is better.
I look in the mirror. Where did the young girl go? She must have gone the way of time, disappearing into history when no one was watching. But she’s safe there, 
forever young, before the claws of the world mauled her beauty. Like a snapshot in time, she’s preserved. I wish I could find her, bring her back and teach her about wisdom. I wish I could turn back the hands of time and, with what I know now, relive crucial moments that forever altered life. I can’t. No one can. Yet, there is hope.
There is a God in Heaven who specializes in second chances. He’s at His best when I am at my worst. He rises to the occasion when I fall at His feet. When I get to the end of myself, I reach the beginning of God. The middle of His will is the safest place I can be, because He makes a way where there is no way. The Lord says in Isaiah 43:19, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” I do see it. Sometimes there’s only enough light to illumine the path a step or two ahead, but I can see the direction it’s leading. Indeed, it leads through the desert, but what a miracle where once there was no road at all.
God loves, He forgives, and He makes a way. It’s painful living with the consequences of our choices, some of which we made at such a tender age we couldn’t possibly comprehend the long-term effects. The world we live in eats it’s young, but God redeems that which is lost. Joel 2:25 says, “I will repay you the years the locusts have eaten,” and the 103rd Psalm declares, “Praise the Lord…who redeems your life from the pit…who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”
Life hurts. It comes at us with everything it has and we falter at its force, but God reaches down, lifts us up and whispers, “Things are not always as they seem; the final say is Mine.”