Destiny

We watched a movie last night, Prince of Persia, that made me start thinking about "destiny." Is destiny up to fate or God or is it up to us?

I've been wrestling with that question today. And when our son was lost in Hawaii we also struggled with it.

There are some things, I believe, that are "destiny," especially for a child of God. The scriptures are full of declarations of our destiny. Ephesians 1 says:

"He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will."

Romans 8 says:

"For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son."

The Bible is full of declarations of destiny. In fact, at the memorial service for John, we sang a song by Michael Jernigan titled, "This is My Destiny." In his song, Michael pulls in many declarations of destiny pulled from throughout scripture such as: servant, warrior, redeemed, chosen, bride-to-be, cleansed, a new creation, overcomer, victorious, crowned and many, many more.

So on the one hand, while there is a sense of destiny that includes eternity for each and every person who makes Jesus his or her savior and Lord, I wonder how our choices affect the destiny we live out here on this earth. We know for certain that our son's choices enabled him to live a life of integrity while pointing others to the eternal hope and eternal destiny that awaits us.

What do you think? Is our destiny beyond our control or do we make our own?

Update on Aloha is Forever book

We decided about a year ago that we would get a professional editor to do the final editing of our book before publishing it. So we put it on hold, found an editor, got the estimate and haven't been able to come up with the funds to pay her.

So we were talking and praying the other day and decided that we would print a run of about 100 books in the current version and then maybe do some more editing before publishing again. In this wonderful day of "print-on-demand" printing, we can do that.

Now to carve out the time to do one last read through ourselves before we send it off to the printer.

We'll keep you posted.