All in the setup

I'm watching Gotham, and it took longer than usual for me to "get into" a show, but now I think it's actually fascinating and complex. I am nearing the end of Season One, and an episode closes with one of the characters doing something uncharacteristically stupid, which will invariably enable even more anarchy and violence in the troubled town.

Sometimes I am watching a show, whichever show that might be, and an event will happen that seems almost ridiculous, and then I think to myself, almost in consolation, "Well, then there would be no story." Isn't this true for so many events in our lives which dumbfound us? How many times have I thought back, often without intention, on something that happened, and wondered, what on earth was that for? 

When I was in and out of the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, my mind was in a constant struggle with itself, and there was one thing that tormented me the most, that I blamed so much of my trouble on - the loss of my best friend in grade six, as we went to different schools when it was time to move on to middle school. (This is how addicts often think - we focus on something to blame or to use as a means of making sense of the way situations turn out. However addicts who recover work through their resentments, the "number one offender", and then rebuild).

Amazingly, she transferred to my high school in one of the last years. We had not kept in touch by the time we had started high school, and by then, we were strangers. That was no excuse for us to not even talk once we were being educated under the same roof, though. Even though I had a new group of friends the real reason was, I couldn't even look at her. I hated who I was growing into. My high school was special in that it offered a program for aspiring Olympians. She was training to go for gold in her sport, and I was doing things I was so ashamed of.

One day in early recovery I was on the bus, and she came to mind, as she often did, and I asked God,
"Why did You take her from me?"
Because that was how victimized I felt, when her parents sent her to Catholic school, and I went on to drown in public school with a bunch of new girls who I just could not relate to. Then a voice came back to answer,
"I have so much more planned for you."
As I stumbled in and out of the rooms in my first two years of being in A.A., I asked God again,
"Why do You let us fall?" This message wasn't God's voice directly, it was maybe an angel's, and it said,
"Because God loves a comeback story."

Without these accidents, or tragedies in our lives that seem so unfair, or so pointless or unnecessary, we would have no "story", we would have nothing to share with the world. The Christian faith teaches that God loved us into existence, and I can respect how so many people would spit on that and say with full conviction in their broken hearts that God doesn't love them, that God doesn't even know they exist. But for me, I know that I don't have to be here, therefore I know I'm important, I am to be used for something and that makes me loved. Ir's a paradox. 

For some reason this world is here, and everything in it is connected, and everything fights for survival, and then passes away. One species depends on another, depends on another, and so it goes. While I am loved, it is not all about me, and once I understood that, the incidents and trappings of my life really just feel like a placement, like preparation for something so much greater than the things I believe I lost. Once my self-absorption became earth-absorption, I found a passion and a purpose for which everything that seemed like the biggest hit, was just in the setup.