Do you see what I see

             Here is a blog post that I have been meaning to write for a while.  It is about something I recently realized.  For years, I have faithfully avoided reading horoscopes or even talking or listening to people who are talking about astrology, because it is not my religion.  I am always polite and tell people when I was born and even what my astrological sign is, but I always skip over the horoscope when reading the comics, and was even faithful about this during my most extreme times of doubt and alienation.  When all my other Christian habits failed, I just for some reason would not dabble in astrology.  And I have really wanted to, and wanted so much to read the horoscope, but I think I caved in only once in about twenty years.  

            I always did so out of sheer obedience and without much concept of any kind of real consequences or purpose.  But in recent years, for some reason, as I have been making choices about what to do next, including big choices like moving to New York City, I have been remembering times even from when I was in college and envisioned the future in certain ways and planned out what would seem right for me to do.  And I am really shocked at how vivid my recollections are, and how much I can see the path that was before me and see how much it turned out to be my actual path. I am talking about specific things like working in a bookstore, being a poet, having various levels of leadership and nonleadership, foreseeing suffering and persecution, and all kinds of stuff.  I mean it is so clear, and I have ideas about what to do next in my life now, too.  And I think that some of what I can see in my mind is probably possible because of a lack of interference from things like astrology.  And I can see how if I tried to find out stuff from horoscopes, it really could have confused me.

            I have often wondered if maybe people who do psychic readings are often people who just weren't blessed with the same church experiences that I have been, and may even be rewarded by God for using their gifts instead of wasting them, even when their service is technically out of bounds for Christians.  And I am also in the camp of people who think that the star the wise men followed in the Bible was something they discovered through astrology.

            And yet I am almost shocked and certain to find that my faithfulness that I thought was just for its own sake might be paying off in ways that impact my whole life, and that I have a clear vision of what is expected of me and what has been expected of me in a way that is miraculously not muddied by a half hearted effort that included consulting with the occult or near occult.
            It is weird, and if people think that it is just the typical thing that happens to people who were born in the same month as me, please don't tell me, because I don't want to know.