Life is what Happens to you

“Life is just what happens to you, While your busy making other plans”

 

That statement was from a song by John Lennon called Beautiful Boy.  It’s a beautiful song about how he can’t wait for Sean to grow up, and how he is excited about seeing him grow up. But as the song states, life happens, and John Lennon was shot and killed shortly after recording this song. The tragedy of it was that John Lennon was not able to see Sean grow up; he was not able to hold his hand as he crossed the street or have a beer with him (all lyrics from the song).

 

But, as John Lennon observed, Life is just what happens to you, While your busy making other plans. This is true for all of us, Life happens.

 

I had a lesson in that the other day, a good friend of mine, my sister and I opened up a small Catholic Gift shop in November of 2006, and yesterday we had to call it quits. The store just was not able to sustain itself. There are lots of reasons, the Michigan economy is bad, a Catholic gift shop is a small market and the list could go on, I am even sure that we, the owners of it, did something’s wrong, but in the end, regardless of all the plans we may have had, life happened, and we have to shut our doors. So now we are busy making other plans.

 

It’s sad to see something you have put everything in to close down, or go away, but its life. Everything has a session, and each session comes and goes, even if we don’t want it to.

 

Many in Michigan would love for spring and fall to be the only two sessions we have, but summer and winter come anyway. So the session of the gift shop is coming to an end, but the dreams and plans we have are not ending, rather they are just starting up.

 

Some would say that we have failed, but I am not one of them, I look at what we have done as a stepping stone for something greater, something bigger. I have learned from this experience, and have grown, as have my two partners.

 

Life is what happens to you, but life is also something you participate in, and in doing so, we help shape how life happens. So I choose to make life happen in a positive way, and see all that is going on with the closing of the gift shop as a positive experience, one that I will learn and grow from.

 

A new session has started for me, one of possibilities, and one of great adventure. It is all that I want it to be and more, because in each day there are millions of possibilities for me, and millions of ways for me to grow. As the sessions change, there is always new things to see and do, fall turns in to winter, and we have a whole new world to explore, winter in to spring and we see new life in everything, and spring turns in to summer as we bask in the warmth of life, and so on… It’s a never ending cycle of change and growth, and with Gods graces I too will always be changing and growing.

 

Some lessons in life are harder then others, such as a death of a loved one, and some seem like the end of everything, such as the closing of a business you have worked hard to make, but really in the end, God has the master plan and it all works out, if we only allow it to.

 

So John Lennon was right, Life is just what happens to you, while you are busy making other plans, but we need to be open to life, and allow it to work through us and we have to work with it. And in the end we will find out, that the plans we had, the plans we made, all happened, just not how we expected them to.

 

To quote another song, this time from the Beatles,

“In the end the love you take is equal to the love you make”

because really, that should be our only real life plan, to love as we are loved.

 

Paul