There are travelers we choose, and travelers we don’t. Yet the longer I walk this winding road, the more I suspect that choice was never the point.
In an older Sunday sermon, Bishop Barron reflected on a simple but unsettling truth: we don’t always get to choose the people we’re called to love. Some arrive like sunlight — easy, warm, familiar. Others enter our lives like weather we didn’t prepare for, testing the seams of our patience and the sturdiness of our compassion.
But what if every person who crosses our path is placed there with intention?
There are moments on the road when I pause, look around, and realize that the life beneath my feet was once only a distant dream. What I now call ordinary was, not so long ago, a hope whispered into the dark.
It’s a strange habit of the human heart—how quickly it grows restless, how easily it forgets the grace of what has already arrived. We hunger for the next horizon, the next comfort, the next shining thing, and in that reaching we risk losing sight of the gifts already resting in our open palms.
So I remind myself to slow down. To breathe. To honor the quiet abundance that surrounds me.
The present I stand in today is something my former self longed for. And it deserves to be cherished before I wander off in search of another dream.