Wait. Don’t hang up. Listen.

Life is not random. It gives us a paved road of opportunities and challenges that shape us into who we are meant to be, into the life that’s ours. We can step onto that road, or distrust its ease and stay stuck in the tar of our faithlessness. Refusing life means chasing a permanence that can’t exist in a pulsing universe. Our evasions and pet strategies make for the shoddy results that keep our habits of stressing, regretting, and complaining well supplied.

To receive the gifts of our lives, we have to let go of our obsession with our likes and dislikes, our cemented ideas of good and bad. Our know-it-all arrogance. They’re demands, and the universe doesn’t respond kindly. We force things to fit our past because it feels like control over our future. If we’re honest, most of the best things that have happened to us had nothing to do with our schemes. They were offerings. Our job is to stop refusing them.

It starts with a nudge. A hunch about something we could do. A whisper of an idea. A reassurance we come across unexpectedly. We only perceive these directions when we’re present to ourselves and to this day. If we’re too far out of our minds, drunk on self-determination, the nudge becomes a shove to the hard ground. Life will have its way. We’ll be humbled again and again until we stop fighting. We have to kill the ego’s grand plans and its obsession with conquering, along with the belief that if we don’t struggle for something, it won’t happen or isn’t real.

When we redirect the time we spend worrying into presence, into listening to what the smallest moments of our days are telling us, and then act on what we hear, trusting it, our needs and many of our wants will come without struggle. Worry is unnecessary. All it does is cause what we’re claiming to prevent. If we’re meant to have something, we will. It will be clear. Nothing can stand against it. In the between, we carry on in faith, in this day, inhabiting our lives rather than escaping them.

Life knows what it is doing. When we sense something larger than our small selves moving, that’s the universe saying heads up, this is coming. It isn’t the starting gun to scramble and force solutions. In that knowing is the seed of the solution. There is planning to be done, steps to be ordered, but not by us. We’re the actors, not the authors.

Distraction keeps us chasing fireflies, anything that flickers, because waiting feels like wasting time. It isn’t. It’s the design. We are not perfect, but the plan for our lives is. Think of waiting as being on call. We’ll know it’s time to move when the next step is obvious. If we don’t pick up, we shut out God.