different roads and many to travel

different roads and many to travel
time will whisper which was followed
solemn, joyful, torn and battered
Each has revealed its purpose at end.

I find it amazing how different our lives can be. No single person has the same life, detail for detail, moment for moment. It amazes me how astonishingly unique we all are. God has a different path for all of us and yet each still leads in the same direction (so long as we chose to take it) : to Him. We all go through different things so that in the end we may know Him. In the problem of Pain -C.S. Lewis says:
"The christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God witholds from us by the very nature of the world:but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ectasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendancy. Our father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home."

All of our lives are so different, but most are scattered with some sorrow and some joy. I think sometimes we may partly understand the purposes of some of our circumstances, during them or after the fact. One of the great things to me is that I can speculate all I want as to why this or that happened. In the end it will probably do me no good unless it helps me to realize that God has His own purposes that are beyond me. And quite frankly, I don't know what they are much of the time. Sometimes you only get so many answers, and in the end you're left trusting that God knows what His purposes are. And as long as you are doing as He tells you, following the road He sets before your feet, you don't always need to know why. It will be a beautiful thing when God fully shows us all of the "why's" to the roads He set us on.