Meander

I stumbled across something interesting in a novella I was reading earlier this week. This book, translated from Japanese, includes many fascinating elements of Japanese culture. One of these was an ideology from an Italian historian and political writer with the name Machiavelli. He wrote that fate, Fortuna, dominated about half of our lives. He illustrated fate as a "goddess, capricious and fickle, or as a river. which could flood at any moment" (Hiraide, 19). The other half of our lives, he claims, are decided by virtù- translated widely as impulse, skill, valor, backbone, decision making, and ability. In some cases, it appears, as "virtù di necessita" which, in English, conveys a deep sense of exaltation with the words "skill displayed in times of emergency".  This human virtù, the only thing that can compete with Fortuna, is deeply rooted in our selfish human desires, and this idea of the combination of the two can serve as a depiction of how God's perfect plan can be warped with our actions and decisions. 
God has given us Free Will, the ability to choose, to discover our own path into His arms, and that is partly what makes this journey so exciting- and real. God ultimately has a plan for us, and our destination. He crafted us with a plan in mind, knowing what we will paint before we even have the chance to grab the brush. But, we still have the ability to move our brushes and mix colors.  We can decide how we create, our words, our actions,even making a decision as simple as turning left instead of right. God gave us the colors and the canvas- our storms, our blessings, and His unending grace. He is guiding our brushstrokes, but our pride and the white noise of the world can drown out the whisper of the Spirit, 
As anyone who has lived a day on this earth would know, our actions have consequences, whether here on Earth or in Heaven. They can change our paths, mold our future, and distort the plan God has for us. Our lives can be viewed as a road trip, each day a mile. God is driving the car, but we hold the map. We can choose which roads we travel down, and how long it takes us to get to what God has in store for us, but God knows the overall destination and where we will end up.
Our free will changes the course of our journey, for example, like it did for Samson. Samson sinned, and what came from it was not the original greatness God had in plan for him. However, God still made him into a great warrior, and a Godly man who did a lot of good. Your mistakes do not define you, and cannot keep you from God's greatness, it might just change the path you were designed to travel on, but not the destination. We may stumble fall into tunnels of heartache, only to land in God's grace. As Hiraide, summarizing Machiavelli, wrote, "fate is a destructive river, The river rages, flooding the plain, consuming trees... Nothing- no one, escapes. Living beings, in turning a corner, or in producing the movements required to enter the crack in a certain partially opened door... [these daily actions] produce their own little rivers... This minor current must then flow into the larger river." We are all small streams flowing into God's overall plan for this little dusty rock we can Earth, but we carve our own meanders as God guides us to His ocean of grace and love.