I was talking to my grieving friend recently and because she’s my friend, I had seen and heard her talk about a lot previously and listening to her after the result of her grief, she sounded different, altering a lot of what she’d said before and I found myself begging her not to make such decisions in certain moods and at that time particularly.

While easier said than done, I said to her to “Allow your life go on as it normally will if that factor didn’t come in to play, don’t build your life around this one season of your life”.

I thought it was dangerous and destructive to the many dreams she had prior to that event of life.

I got thinking further, we experience change daily in life but every now and again, there could be those huge changes that occur that we didn’t see coming and could do little or nothing about, those changes could come in various forms including a heart break, death of a loved one, failure in school or career or a rejection from something you really wanted and because of the gravity of these seasons, the impact is even more lasting on us experiencing it. But we must be careful that the impact does not morph to be monuments in our lives that we run to for comfort, clarity or direction.

We learn through every phase of our lives but we cannot become servants to those phases. This is why we must heal from pain and forgive ourselves for the wrong decisions in the past. The danger of not doing this is that you become a victim of the pain and you view your life and every chapter after that through the lens of that past occurrence.

As we move, certain junctures in life will require we build monuments, for remembrance, for reference or even for direction, but it is important that the monuments inspire us to be and do better and not draw or shrink us back.

I found myself praying for her, for me and for everyone else, that every monument erected in our life, like Israel is a reminder to us of the God we serve and how He sees us through every step of the journey.