If you could be a character from a book or film, who would you be? Why?

When I am about to re-enter a dangerous situation and arrogantly presume I will get out again, my husband often retorts:

“Aye Daniel was freed from the den of lions – but he didn’t go back for his bonnet!”

This usually makes me laugh myself back to my senses. Not so for Lot’s wife, the character today I can imagine being. She went back to longing for Sodom and Gomorrah in her mind even though she had divine orders and the protection to move away. Her story scares me in the same way looking down from a tall cliff or from a bridge over dark waters does. I can identify with Lot’s wife. I feel the overwhelming pull sometimes to destruction, to look back, to stay with what’s familiar even if it’s horrendous and sinful. I dream about running away from what needs to be left but my legs turn to jelly. I am trapped, paralysed like Lot’s wife. Luckily I wake up!

Yes I can identify with Lot’s wife. I have had a lot to learn. By the grace of God I learnt it before it was too late, before I had solidified into salt with no choices left. In new situations I need to keep learning to go forward. To accept things as they are and that I am not in control.

Life is not a lottery. God has a plan and I need to listen. Walk by Faith not my own greed or wilful abandonment to self will, luck or fate. Today is a new season. For me it is about a lot of endings. Loved ones with serious illness. Support networks with new unwelcome agendas. It’s easy to grasp at potential dependencies, to enlist others who I think will ‘look after’ my future.

Lot’s wife was not an esteemable woman. She epitomises the most nihilistic aspect of human nature. She serves me as a great example of how not to live.

As the saying goes:

Jesus is the way the truth and the life. If I go forward I get to find out what happens next. Time and time again that is a place of peace, even with sorrow, and where no big lions will devour me.