The Tribune

By BIANCA CARTER

I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge country music fan, but the likes of Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood and Lady Antebellum have made country music much more mainstream in my opinion.

There’s a fairly old country song by singer Garth Brooks called “Unanswered Prayers”.

The chorus goes, “Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers. Remember when you’re talkin’ to the man upstairs, that just because he doesn’t answer doesn’t mean he don’t care, Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”

For whatever reason, that chorus stuck with me. Every time I hear it, I get the chorus stuck in my head in that very annoying kind of way.

In college, the words of that chorus didn’t mean the same for me as they do now. It honestly made me wonder, “What on earth would anyone pray about that wouldn’t be better if the ‘man upstairs’ didn’t answer?”

Not everyone prays, but many people do, especially when hard and confusing times are present in their lives. As human beings, we want answers to everything. We’re constantly asking questions; scientists, children, adults, we even ask ourselves internal questions on a daily basis.

It’s a human condition and a good one most of the time. Life is enhanced and also advances by the ability to find the answer to questions. Take Einstein’s gravitational waves theory that scientists took 100 years to prove. But life isn’t black and white; life is more about the grey areas. It would be great if we could predict everything and have our lives play out exactly the way we imagine. I do believe that our thoughts and ideas, wishes and dreams can be manifested in reality. People achieve their dreams all the time, but the road and path that it took to get where they wanted, probably didn’t look like they imagined.

Take Steve Jobs for example, I bet he never dreamed he would be fired from his own company, Apple, his “baby” and his creation, but he was.

I bet on the day he got fired, Jobs might have felt that everything was lost. I’m sure he couldn’t have predicted that he would end up in such a predicament. But what came out of such a predicament was really awesome. He bought Pixar Animation in 1986 and made it hugely successful. Pixar is famous for the animated movies: Toy Story, Brave, Cars, and recently The Good Dinosaur. You may know it as Disney Pixar since Disney bought the company in 2006 for $7.4 billion, making Jobs the single largest shareholder of Disney at the time. Some people call that “beauty for ashes”l Jobs called it “connecting the dots.” Watch his Stanford commencement speech, he’ll tell you what that means.

The point is that many things don’t always go as planned. The road and the journey are most often a lot different than what you have imagined and let’s face it, what you really want it to look like. Maybe you feel like you can never get ahead because you keep having setbacks. Here’s the thing, sometimes the greatest events or blessings in your life come in unexpected ways. That’s what Garth Brooks meant in his song. Sometimes you can hope and wish, pray and bargain for your life to move and be a certain way, but when you tread the waters and eventually look back on your life, you’ll realize that not having your way can work out to be so much better. Unexpected things happen, the things we don’t like and don’t want to happen, sometimes do. But understanding that it tends to all work out in the end is the key to staying in your “happy space.”

To all the control freaks out there, like me: have courage; you’ll connect the dots one day.

Love and hugs!

• Bianca Carter is a certified lactation counsellor (CLC), founder of Bun in the Oven, and weekend radio personality on Y98 radio. For more information, e-mail her at info@babybunintheoven.com, or bcarter@tribunemedia.net. Follow BITO on Facebook at babybunintheoven, and check out the BITO Blog every Monday and Thursday at http://babybunintheoven.com.