Many people try, well rather most people try but you can’t plan your life out. From the moment most of us enter school, we start thinking of how our lives will go. What college/university we will go to, what job we will get, or what career we will venture in. It’s an arduous list of plans, checklists and goals over things we really have no control over; unless you live your life so carefully, you hardly live at all.
 

You see, it’s the surprises, the changes, the unanticipated moments that mould your life. It’s the things you don’t plan that alter your future and have a large hand in who you are to become. It’s the bumps along the way, the unforeseen potholes, and the strangers you pick up. It’s the forks in the road, the unmarked road signs and the wrong turns that lead you to where you should ultimately end up.

The difference is how you react to those changes. Do you warmly accept and welcome the unexpected or do you try to fight it, slamming the door in its face?

For those who try to fight the unpredicted, life seems more like a battlefield than a playground of new opportunity. Fighting the unexpected only sets them up for a lifetime of challenges and lost battles. Because you can’t fight the unforeseen, it will only enter through an unlocked window.

Those who have learned to truly live know that the unforeseen should not be fought but welcomed. The unanticipated is inevitable and you can either choose to greet it like an enemy or welcome it as a friend who is going to bring you to new places and introduce you to new people in your life.

The unexpected is missing your flight and spending the day in the airport lounge talking to strangers who end up inviting you to their party. It’s the time your train is delayed so you take another that has a stop in a totally different town for a couple of days. It’s not getting into the college/university of your dreams, but getting into another you never considered, where you end up meeting your best friends for life. It’s when you didn’t get that job you wanted and spent the day sulking in bed. But lo and behold another job was offered to you, one that changed everything.

Because life is never going to work out how you planned and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you will start greeting the unexpected with open arms. Let the unknown, the unplanned and the possibility of change excite you and keep the future an unknown secret that can only be found out through time.

It’s the unforeseen that changes your life that takes you to new places and brings you to new people. It’s what adds vitality and mystery to our seemingly dull lives. So let the unexpected take you to places you never knew, introduce you to friends you’ve never met and bring new meaning to your life.

The unforeseen is not a deviation from the plan; it’s just the new plan. Changes, unforeseen occurrences and surprises are what help define your future. It’s the plan that you didn’t realize you had, but should most definitely adhere to. The unforeseen should never be viewed as bad, but a necessary detour on the highway of life.

It’s that job you got when you didn’t get the other one. It’s the people you met when you missed your train who introduced you to new things, a new world. It’s the towns you discovered when you took another path, because the other was closed.

Being able to “roll with the punches” is a very admirable and important trait. Being able to adapt to change and welcome it will make life not only a lot easier, but also more fun.

It will open another world of opportunity and give you a freedom many people will never experience. Because being able to adapt to change and understand it as a good thing is a necessary quality to living stress free and also as freely and confidently as that soulful bunch that just lets life take them where they should go.

The unforeseen is a friend in itself, but it is also the key to meeting new ones. Without change, there would be no reason to meet anyone new. There would be no room for new people or new experiences. It’s the unexpected that brings you to the new places with the new people who have yet to make an impression on your life.

Without the unforeseen, you would have never met those people in the airport or your best friends at college/university. There’s a lot of interesting people out there and the unexpected is just the stops on the path to meeting them.

Only those who are ready for the unforeseen can live a full life. Those who are excited by the unknown and the unplanned are those who are most free, the least unshackled by the monotony of life. They are ready for everything, yet at the same time, never ready. Accepting the unforeseen as a welcomed friend is the only way to stay ahead of the game, to not let change knock you down or to be afraid to face the unknown.

If you’re the kind of person who looks at life with a “glass half full” mentality, then you know that every missed opportunity is just another opportunity waiting to be unveiled. Because there is no such thing as shut doors, just ones that have yet to be opened. Every wrong turn, every mistake, every delay is just another opportunity to experience something new.

It’s the missed chances that turn into new opportunities, opportunities that would have never arisen if you didn’t miss that flight or get into your chosen college/university. Not getting that job you wanted just means you were meant for a different one, one that may be better for you.

The unforeseen can be hard to embrace to the extent to which we human beings sometimes fiercely resist it, and how that resistance can sometimes jeopardize our chances of meeting our personal goals.

Figuring out how to “bridge” to a new set of circumstances can feel so daunting. This can even be true even when the unforeseen is positive. Yet, in spite of the challenges in managing through a transition, I have learned from my own experience that embracing the unexpected and evaluating its ramifications may likely result in positive outcomes.

Compiled by Ashley Mwanza from various sources.

In three words, blunt and absolute, Jesus commanded us, "Do not judge." But did he really mean that we should never judge others? He goes on to suggest that it's not the act of judging but the attitude with which we do it that God is most concerned about, "For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged." 

Judgment is an important piece of work that God calls us to do, especially in a world going morally haywire. Common sense suggests that if no one ever judged other people, there would be no real human community. In a sinful world, no community can exist for long where nobody is ever held accountable. No citizen would sit on a jury or call a failed leader to account. And, when you come to think of it, nobody would ever forgive anyone for wrongs he/she had done; we only forgive people for what we blame them, and we blame them only after we have judged them.

We have a moral responsibility to judge the moral behaviour of others but only if we are humbly aware that we will sometimes be dead wrong and never totally right. We must remember that our ability to judge is limited and especially that we are not perfect people who will ourselves, one day, come under judgment.

Jesus warns his disciples against following the traditions and practices of the Pharisees, who judged others as if they themselves were beyond judgment. Do not be like the Pharisees. Most likely, Jesus meant, "Do not judge at all if you judge others the way the Pharisees do. If you do judge people this way, you will be judged with the same severity." Jesus' intent comes out in his metaphor of motes/twigs/splinters and beams/logs. We all have beams/logs in our eyes, so to speak; to judge people for the little motes/twigs/splinters stuck in their eyes while we have big beams in our own is devilish arrogance as well as folly.

Let's not try to fix but to love. "Let the one who is without fault be the first to cast a stone." - Jesus Christ

Ashley Mwanza