On Lake Superior one night, far away from the lights of the shoreline homes, the moon rose out of the water like a dripping luminescent orange. And as dusk darkened into night, the stars shined evermore brightly. I felt as if I was drifting beneath a huge backlit blueprint spread out across the sky.
Of course, a blueprint is a plan, a detailed sketch of the building to be constructed. Astrologers study the stars and say that the structure of our lives is conjoined to their movements. How true this is I don’t know, but that there is a blueprint and destiny to our lives is clear to me.
We can build our lives well, with careful attention to the plan, the blueprint, or we can build it poorly, or not at all. Some people try to build a house entirely different from the blueprint and destiny they’ve been given. They end up living a life that is not their own.
Sometimes I wonder why, in my early teens, I wound up spending a night on a fishing boat 20 miles off shore on Lake Superior. A boy among four men on a drifting boat who’s battery had died earlier that day. One of the fishing guides, a man named Holman, owned the boat. Holman sounds like whole-man, but I didn’t think him that whole. I thought him unprepared and alcoholic. We didn’t catch any fish that day and we shivered through the night. But I did see the moon rise like a wet, glowing orange from the horizon, and stars so bright you’d think you could reach out and touch them. Perhaps it was an initiation orchestrated by God, the biggest catch that I would ever haul from that Great Lake. An unlucky day was my lucky destiny.