We Often Walk Away Before God Has Finished
The hidden tragedy on the road to Emmaus isn’t that Jesus was absent. It’s that the disciples left too soon.
Welcome to today’s reflection.
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This is not the reflection I started writing this morning.
One of the frustrating things about writing for a living is that I can spend hours on a reflection, only to realise it isn't the one I'm meant to publish that day. Not because it is full of errors or mistakes, but because it just doesn't feel right for that moment.
That is what happened this morning. So I parked it as a draft and started the reflection you are reading now. The chances are this one made it to publication, or you would not be reading it now.
The thing is, nothing is wasted. Just because this morning’s reflection did not feel like the right thing to publish today does not mean I cannot revisit it later. I review lots of reflections regularly, just to test them again. Very often, what wasn’t a good fit in the moment will be just what was needed for a different day.
It made me think this morning about how often we reach conclusions before the story has really finished.
Sometimes we assume there is nothing left to discover. Sometimes we decide that a chapter has closed, only to realise later that we walked away just before something wonderful was about to emerge.
