The Time Traveler's Future???

**Warning... If you are planning on reading this book, there are some spoilers throughout this blog...***

I just finished reading "The Time Traveler's Wife" this week, and really enjoyed reading a different type of book than usual. From seeing the previewsfor the subsequent movie, I knew that I was just asking for a crying fest (and I got it!) but I had heard it was a good book so I scooped it up, ran home, and started reading away. It was a great book, but it got me thinking...

For those of you who have never read/heard of the book (or movie that has just been released) the story is about a man who travels through time with no control over when he travels or where he goes. He just randomly leaves the present and shows up in different times of the past/future, and after some sort of experience he gets shifted back to the present time. During his travels, he revisits the day his mother passed away, meets his wife and a few friends, visits his younger self, and even sees his future daughter. Because he cannot control his paths, he isn't able to make himself move into the future as often as he would like. About 3/4 of the time he is spending his travels in the past, so during his future travels he is very intentional about taking in all that he can to learn what may happen later in his life.
Due to the fact that time traveling isn't really typical in our world, he is not able to tell many people about his experiences. He shares the information with his wife, his father, a couple best friends and doctors. When those close to him find out they are always eager to know the future. They already know the past, so there is of course no need for him to recite to them what has already happened. There is a point where his wife is insistant on knowing what happens in the future. The have not been able to have a baby and do not know why, and she finds out he has traveled to the future and he knows what happens. Over and over she tells him she wishes she knew, and over and over he does not tell her. He feels it may change the future to know it.

I know this wasn't a book that taught on Christian values, or one that instills morals in a person, but there were points that still hit me really hard.
I constantly want to know what is going to come in my future, and I'm sure most of you do also. We sit and wish we just knew where it was all headed and what God has in store for us. When we are in the midst of trouble, we just want to know that one day it will be okay. When life is great, we want to know we something will ruin our "high." But God never called us to know our future. That is for only him to know! I know God's will is already laid out for us before we are even conceived, but what if there is a possibility that the time traveler is right in his thinking that if you know the future you could possibly change it? If you found out at 18 what your future career would be, wouldn't that cause you to do things differently than if you just blindly pursued your life? Even more serious, what if you found out that your best friend was going to pass away in within days... Wouldn't you want to spend more time with them... Want to intervene somehow so that you could keep them longer.
There are reasons why we don't know the future. If we knew everything that was going to happen in our life, everything would change. We would only pursue those things that we knew would happen and not have the experiences along the way that we feel are unnecessary. Worse yet, what if we became angry because of something we knew would happen in the future and because of that we decided to never come to know this God that would do that to us.
We were not called to know our future... We were called to live intentionally for the future that God has laid out for us that we do not yet know. If we knew things that were to come, we would have no reason to trust God.

So instead of wishing we knew what was to come, perhaps we should just remember to trust God and live a life of intentional pursuit. That, in my mind, is a million times better than knowing the future. Because if you are trusting God, you at least know the end result of your life... And that sure is enough for me.