They're hard at work on the main interchange for our town--the one between our east-west highway and the four-lane into the city. Earth-moving machines bumble like humongous bugs, hauling soil from point A to point B, building up the ramps and overpass. The site is crawling with guys putting up forms and pouring concrete. It's a four-year-old boy's idea of heaven on earth.

I was out too, for less large and grandiose purposes--picking up some stuff from the office and meeting a friend for lunch--and found myself stopped, waiting for some big-bug earth-movers to bounce across from one earth-mound to another. It took a while. While I waited for the bored signalwoman's sign to flip from STOP to SLOW, I watched a power shovel gently scratch up a ton or so of soil, dump it about 15 feet from its source, and then smooth and pat it flat with surprisingly delicate back-and-forth motions of its huge toothed bucket. I know this is anthropomorphizing (felinopomorphizing?) but the shovel looked almost playful, like a vastly overgrown kitten playing boogeties.

I have no idea why that scoopful of soil needed to go from Point A to Point B; you couldn't tell a thing from the general mess. That small patch of beaten-up landscape didn't look like part of a ditch or ramp or overpass. But the operator was mostly likely tossing this scoopful of schloop around for a reason. Presumably the results will become clearer in time.

We would all, of course, love to have God skywriting for us: "You are going through this particular whatever-it-is right now because in six months' time you are going to be over here and I have to nudge you around a bit first to get you correctly lined up and ready." Ha. It is to laugh. Life doesn't work that way. Only long after the fact can we look back and figure out what the pattern was. At the time, we seemed to be stumbling in confusion through what we later see to have been a dance of some complexity.

Maybe we won't find out for years what the pattern was. Maybe for some of the greater patches of obscurity in life, we won't figure it out at all in this life--maybe that discovery waits on the other side of the river. But often it feels as though God leaves us here in the mud and muddle, trying desperately to be patient and trustful and usually not managing either very well.

It's particularly hard because when you're in the middle of what seems like a big almighty mess, you cannot possibly sort out what's God's purpose and what's not--what's God's will or what's the result of your own sometimes misguided will, or the misguided wills of others whose influence over your life may be profound and anything but beneficial. A friend came back from a month in Bangladesh and says quite firmly that she couldn't see God anywhere there, not one bit, theology be damned, and sometimes life is indeed like that: simply too chaotic to see God anywhere at all..

I wish I could say "always do this thing or that thing, and it will all be okay," but I've rarely found a simple rule that couldn't easily be misused. Sometimes it's right to embrace, sometimes it's best to refrain from embracing. Sometimes it's right to forgive; sometimes it's right to say, "No, that was wrong and I will not accept it from you." Sometimes it's right to laugh or weep or roar with anger; sometimes it's best to bide in disciplined quiet. But if we think a particular choice is simple black-and-white, it's almost always either because the decision doesn't matter much, or because we haven't given it nearly enough thought.

It helps to keep the end in mind. We don't carry out of life our actions and achievements; we leave them behind, and they will be as dust in a thousand years or so, as this new intersection will be--probably a whole lot sooner than that for the vast majority of us. We may be scrupulously orthodox and rigidly lawful, righteous in our anger against what is Clearly Wrong, doing nothing in contravention to Scripture and Tradition, and still be as shrivelled and sour as pickled gherkins. We may fall off the wagon and tumble into stupidities and be clowns and lost sheep and prodigal children and still fetch up as golden, generous hearts, full of joy and compassion, making God smile. That's what at the end of this sometimes bewildering process: taking our souls, whatever we and God and life have made of them, to show the God who made us.

The one thing I am sure of is this: if you live life trusting in God's love and power and good purposes, and if you do your best to conform to the Great Commandment, putting it above all other laws and prophets--then whatever God and you and life make of your life, God and life and you will make something good of you. Make your choices accordingly.

Invite the Spirit to direct your ways, welcoming it into your life, and have faith in God's love and in the path Christ blazed for us through the wilderness. Live with a view of the Kingdom in the corner of your eye, remembering always that it is a place of deep delight, and however muddled your life may seem now, in the end it will indeed all come round right.