Before I knew there was a road,
people had already been walking it.
O’Neal had lived a life
before Sue.
There were daughters before my mother.
A marriage before the marriage.
Stories already in motion
before anybody knew my name.
Then came the twins.
Kathy and Neal.
My grandparents stood in the yard,
each holding a child,
as if they had any idea
where any of this was going.
Years later,
my mother held me much the same way.
Six months old.
No plans.
No résumé.
No idea about Georgia,
or Athens,
or Christy,
or children of my own.
Certainly no idea
that one day I would sit with these photographs
and wonder how all those lives
somehow became mine.
We like to call things fate
once we know how they turned out.
It makes the road look straighter
than it ever was.
But old photographs tell the truth.
Nobody in them knows what comes next.
The marriages.
The losses.
The children.
The mistakes.
The mercy.
They know only the piece of road
beneath their feet.
Steinbeck wrote about an old Hebrew word:
Timshel.
Thou mayest.
Not thou shalt.
Not it has already been written.
Mayest.
Maybe that is the strange gift
God has given us.
We inherit a road
without inheriting a destination.
Blood gives us a beginning.
Place gives us a beginning.
Our fathers and mothers give us more
than we will ever fully understand.
Some of it blessing.
Some of it burden.
Most of it both.
But sooner or later,
they put us down.
And we walk.
We may repeat what came before us.
We may redeem it.
We may wander for twenty years
only to discover
we have been carrying our grandfather’s hands
and our mother’s eyes
the whole way.
Perhaps fate is not a destination at all.
Perhaps it is simply the place
where choice begins.
Thou mayest go.
Thou mayest stay.
Thou mayest become
what everyone expected.
Thou mayest become something else.
The way is open.
And somewhere behind us
are people standing in old photographs,
holding babies,
with absolutely no idea
what they have begun.
Boutwell Jones
redclagospel.com