Video from Ahmed El-Meghany
Benjamin Button : "Your life is defined by its opportunities ,even the ones you miss."
Opportunities come and go in our lives. Often they will not come again. We do not have a comprehensive view of life, our lives or anyone else. We see the world through a glass darkly and are distracted by the world and our own sin. We also seldom understand or take into account that if you are a Christian God the father, Christ Jesus and the Person of the Holy Spirit are always striving with your human spirit and the world around you including other people to bring about good.
One example of this providentially is Esther. Scripture says: Esther 4:14 "For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
Note God says "deliverance for the Jews will rise from another place". The fact is if we miss an opportunity through our poor judgement or other circumstances God's meticulous sovereignty is always at work. We may not see the results of his work for some time yet he continues unabated and unstoppable.
Yet we have trouble making decisions, we have to many choices.
In his book The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz explains why we have trouble committing, why we love to keep our options open. As a culture we demand and options. We falsely think and imagine that more options mean more freedom. And most people think , again in a false and foolish manner that limitless freedom must be a good thing.
The truth is the calls for freedom we hear so often from people on TV and elsewhere are not desire for freedom (Do we really know what true freedom is?) but selfish desires to sin or get out of responsibility.
The irony, Schwartz says, is that this apparently limitless choice doesn’t actually make us happy. The number of choices we have today becomes overwhelming, and actually makes it difficult for us to ever have joy fully committing to anything or anyone.
So yes the opportunities we miss can help define us in a worldly sense. Yet that recognition is of no value to our Lord. He desires you to be happy but more than that he desires you to be faithful and seek him as the most important person in your life.
So perhaps in your life you have messed up and missed some great opportunities. If we truly believe our Lord and we are obedient he will provide for us in some manner now or later the answer to our prayers. The problem is most Christians never ask.