Sometimes a man, despite his best efforts, doesn’t find his destiny. Try as he might, down through the earnest years of his life, he chases it and even can believe he has it, only to awaken one morning and discover he doesn’t — that what he has is an illusion, a mirage that he tried to turn into reality.
Then, unexplainably, destiny finds him. It wasn’t anywhere he looked or even cared to peek. Yet it threw itself into his path, tackled him, and when he stopped wrestling against the mighty force, he saw he was staring right smack into the eye of what God had destined for him all along. Then he gave up the fight against it, embraced it and found true contentment and happiness. He had arrived.
For that is what destiny truly is — the soul’s satisfaction in knowing that you are where you are meant to be. That from the moment that life was breathed into your nostrils and the pulse of blood began, there was a purpose and plan. There was a destination that awaited.
I never thought much about this until I watched as my husband’s destiny landed in his hands and saw the happiness that lighted from within the deepest reaches of his being. I laugh often as joy crinkles the corners of his sparkling eyes and, like a young boy who has caught his first bass, he can’t stop smiling. It is, without question, the most captivating point of my life: watching the man I love pull destiny into his arms, hug it to his chest tightly and declaring, “I am so blessed. I have found where I was meant to be.”
It came as a surprise. Utterly and totally. At times, I still shake my head in wonderment and marvel at the amazement of God’s plan and how the oddest pieces of a puzzle will fit together without being forced. How in a million years you would never think those pieces would match, yet they melt together and you cannot decipher where one ends and the other begins. Sometimes, as I watch him dance through the house with a child’s excitement, I am speechless. There is nothing I can say.
 “I am home, baby! I am back in my beloved Georgia, the South that calls me home.” He radiates so I, both bemused and amused, gently laugh and say, “You are beyond entertaining. I have never seen anyone love a place like you do.”
He will quickly tell you how the South, though both storied and gloried, is the last place he ever expected to live. It certainly is not the place where he thought his destiny awaited. Oh, no. He fell under the misconceptions of many who don’t grow up here, fate not being as kind to them as it is to us. He opined then that we talk too slow, think too long and saunter too slowly through life. This being a common misperception from those who are “smarter” than us because they choose to sit in stalled traffic for hours a week on Los Angeles freeways and pay 20 times the price for a handful of dirt that we do.
My husband comes from a long line of proud, noble Yankees who helped settle America, then served this country and even presidents. His grandfather provided the key evidence that broke open the Lindbergh-baby kidnapping for the FBI and made a legend of J. Edgar Hoover. Then a few of them headed west, where they contributed to television history.
Then, just like that, destiny intervened. It threw that somber Yankee to the ground, the same soil that once absorbed the blood of the war between our people, and gave him a good reckoning. He found his calling in the unlikeliest of places.
And he came home.
 
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